The Malaysian government has known almost since the start that this was a criminal act, but because they were afraid it would lead to Islamics within their country and either official complicity or staggering official ineptitude, they have been out front frantically trying to mislead the investigation since the very beginning.
I still think that the plane did not crash but that the passengers are probably dead (for one thing, no ransom-demanding jihadi is going to attempt to feed and keep alive 285 hostages out in some remote location) and that the objective was to get the plane and possibly the gold that was supposedly on it. There were a lot of theories at the beginning about its destination being Somalia or some other Muslim pirate-infested African hell-hole.
I don’t know, but at least we’re one step closer to acknowledging that it was an act of air piracy.
How do you know there was no ransom demand?