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NEW DAY SUNDAY

MH370 Interim Report Reveals Chaos Confusion; Four Arrests In Murder Of Kremlin Critic; New Audio In Police Shooting Of Black Teen

Aired March 8, 2015 - 06:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOE JOHNS, CNN GUEST ANCHOR: Breaking news, we are learning more new details this morning about the chaos and confusion on the night Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing.

CHRISTI PAUL, CNN ANCHOR: The much anticipated investigation interim report is released and it gives us a better picture of the crisis. Good morning to you. It's so grateful to have your company as always. I'm Christi Paul.

JOHNS: I'm Joe Johns in for Victor Blackwell.

PAUL: It's so good to have you with us here again, Joe. Listen, we want to get straight to this breaking news because it's being called a massive failure of civilian and military radar along with air traffic control.

JOHNS: The Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished one year ago today. We just received hundreds of pages of the first interim report from the Malaysian government.

PAUL: And part of that confusion involves radar operators, who were back and forth for hours asking, have you seen that plane? CNN's aviation correspondent, Richard Quest sifted through all of these documents. Good morning, Richard.

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Christi and Joe. Hundreds of pages of documents supporting background information have now been released although they don't give us any information about what happened in the cockpit, we still don't know why the plane went missing or indeed where it ended up.

They paint a very detailed picture of the aircraft, its systems, its crew, and how air traffic control performed on the night. It's not a pretty picture. On the question of the pilots, any evidence, there is simply no evidence that the captain was in any way unstable.

In fact, the report specifically says the captain's ability to handle stress at work and home was good. There was no known history of anxiety, apathy, or irritability. No significant changes, into personal conflict or family stresses.

There is more. Neither the captain or the pilot or the co- pilot had any financial problems. They had regular bank accounts, regular mortgages, insurance policies and the like nothing out of the ordinary.

In terms of what happened on the night, here we see a very different picture, confusion and chaos somewhat between Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Kuala Lumpur as they look for the plane.

Many hours going by with seemingly nobody having any urgency that this was now turning into a crisis, and the underwater locator, batteries had actually expired. Now, we don't know what the effect might have been in terms could they have lasted the full 30 days, but clearly we have been told previously they were good.

Now we know they are not. The picture we are getting of what happened on the night certainly contributed we have no idea where the plane has ended up.

PAUL: Just bizarre. All right, Richard Quest, thank you so much.

JOHNS: For the families of the Flight 370 this past year has just simply been gut wrenching. They gathered this morning for a vigil in Kuala Lumper where that doomed flight first took off.

CNN's Anna Coren is live in Kuala Lumpur. Anna, has there been any reaction from the families now that this new report has been released?

ANNA COREN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Joe, from the families that we have spoken to, many of them have actually not read the report. The reason being is that it's almost 600 pages long. They also believe that they are not going to gain any new information because at the end of the day, it does not tell them what happened to MH-370.

But certainly some of the families that we had spoken to in the lead-up to the release of this report they were angry that authorities were going ahead and releasing it on the day of the anniversary.

They found that to be insensitive and completely inappropriate. These families are grieving greatly, as they have been the last 12 months. Today, even more so because it just hits home that it has been one year since their loved ones vanished without a trace.

JOHNS: So Anna, are we in the posture right now where this search is going to continue indefinitely? Any sense from anyone about whether it's going to, at some point, have to wind down?

COREN: Yes, look, Joe, certainly the Malaysian prime minister came out this morning and said that Malaysia is committed to the search. He obviously prefaced that by not saying that this meant after they go through the priority search area.

Now that priority search area is about thousand nautical miles off the coast of Western Australia that is being scoured as we speak by four search vessels that have been out there since August going through each of the ocean floor, an area of 23,000 square miles.

The 40 percent of that has been covered and hoping to get it through all of it by the end of May. The concern, of course, Joe is that if it's not there, the debris is not there, what is going to happen after May?

No one will say whether or not the search will continue. We have heard mumblings from Australia that this cannot go on forever. Remember, this is a search which Australia and Malaysia is putting in the money, $120 million, the most expensive search in the history of the world, but, you know, the families are really saying this cannot go on forever, but for now, they are hoping the search will continue.

JOHNS: Anna Coren in Kuala Lumpur, thank you so much for that.

PAUL: Now earlier today, the head of the international investigation team said officials are committed to figuring out what happened to the missing Boeing 777.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KOK SOO CHON, HEAD OF THE INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT 370 INVESTIGATION TEAM: In the months ahead, the investigation team will need to analyze, to draw conclusions, and safety recommendations based on the factual information that had been gathered. In addition to the analysis and the conclusion face of the investigation, steps taken will also include further validation of the information on images of new information.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PAUL: Let's talk with CNN safety analyst and former FAA safety inspector, David Soucie. David, thanks for being with us. He is the author of "Malaysian Airlines Flight 370." First of all, I want to get your initial reaction to the report.

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, the report is what we would have expected. It was a shock to me that they actually found that the battery life on the underwater locator beacon had been exceed. What that indicates to me there is some maintenance issues.

That is something that is 101 when we talk about maintenance of aircraft. To be able to maintain the things that are supposed to be done on routine schedule that worries me the fact that they missed that.

It indicates that there might be something more. In the other thing that it does for me is it validates these -- the Inmarsat pings that we've been talking about all along. There's been some question recently as to whether or not they were altered with or changed.

But there is nothing in the report that would tell us that those pings are not good, that the handshakes didn't occur, because they did and that really helps validate this search area so I'm hopeful that they are in the right area and that the search will continue. PAUL: OK, I think you're referring to some reports out there that there's speculation that this plane went north instead of south and it's in Kazakhstan somewhere.

SOUCIE: Right.

PAUL: You're saying today that you are confident it is in this seventh arc as they call it?

SOUCIE: Yes. This report actually validates that for me. I believe it is in the southern corridor and there is nothing in the report that would discredit any of that information that points us to the south.

PAUL: All right, I want to get back to the maintenance issue you were talking about. Because the other thing that stood out is initially there was talking there was bad weather that could have contributed. We now know that not to be the case. Because of that, do you deduce there was some sort of mechanical failure?

SOUCIE: I do. There is an analysis that we done using the 125 validated assumptions, is what we call them. Those are all held up by this report and what we do in that report is we compare those assumptions to each other and what that points to most is that there was a mechanical or even a fire on board the aircraft that caused the depressurization of the aircraft and that would explain nearly everything that went on after that as well.

PAUL: Richard Quest has said this was a massive failure between civilian and military radar and air traffic control. In other words, he is saying is not just mechanical problems but, obviously, some real human error here.

SOUCIE: Absolutely. The mechanical problems may have been the initial cause, but subsequent to that, these errors that Richard is referring to, is something that we suffered in the United States pre- 911, the communication between the military radar and the civilian radar.

These are things that are so important and in those first four to eight hours, that communication did not occur in Malaysia. It's a lesson they did not learn from us.

Today, in the United States, those controllers are sitting shoulder-to-shoulder literally working together on that control of the air space. Malaysia didn't have that and I would expect that over the next year or two. That is going to change.

PAUL: Real quickly, only a couple of seconds, but Anna Coren talked about it. The Australian prime minister saying now the search cannot go on forever. How long do you think the search will go on if we don't find something?

SOUCIE: They only have $120 million and a little bit less than halfway through that right now. So I think it will continue until the money is up and I think that is what's going to be the determining factor. PAUL: Until the funding runs out. All right, David Soucie, always appreciate your insight. Thanks for being with us.

SOUCIE: Thank you.

PAUL: Joe.

JOHNS: We've got new information coming in from Russia learning more about one of the suspects behind the assassination of President Putin's top critic. He is a former police officer.

PAUL: New audio released in the case of a police officer who shot and killed a teenager in Madison, Wisconsin, this weekend. Just ahead, hear exactly what happened.

JOHNS: President Obama is revealing when and how he first learned that Hillary Clinton used a private e-mail account when she was his secretary of state.

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PAUL: It's 14 minutes past the hour. We are just learning one of the four men arrested this weekend in the murder of a top Putin critic is a former police officer.

Now these four men accused in the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in the heart of Moscow last Friday. Grainy surveillance video captured his murder play out too. We have been looking at that for a week.

JOHNS: Absolutely. You can see Nemtsov, one of Russia's most prominent opposition figures walking home with his girlfriend when a gunman fired four shots into his back just steps away from the kremlin.

PAUL: The head of the Russian security announced the arrest on television. That is a sign of how many the authorities want to be seen as taking this case seriously. But critics are still very skeptical of this whole thing.

JOHNS: So far, the officials have released very little detail about the four men. We have only learned two of the suspects' names. We also know that all four suspects are Chechens and two of them were brothers. One of the suspects, again, is a former police officer in the Chechen Republic.

Sir Tony Brenton is joining us from London. He is also the former British ambassador to Russia. I wanted to ask you, first of all, what do you make of the fact that one of the suspects these suspects is a former Chechen police officer?

SIR TONY BRENTON, FORMER BRITISH AMBASSADOR TO RUSSIA: Not that surprising. They are places where the gap between the police and the criminal fraternity are not that wide.

PAUL: Well, I'm wondering if they are from that area, what would the motivation be to kill Nemtsov because Nemtsov was an opposition leader? A lot of us look at this and think would they not have been essentially on the same side, Nemtsov and these -- this Chechen -- and the folks in the north caucuses, or is it more complicated than that?

BRENTON: I don't think that is really the way to look at it. I would guess -- obviously, I don't know -- but if you're shopping for a hit man in Russia today is the place you go is the north Chechen in particular where lots of outlawry and guns for fire. My guess is, if these guys did it, were probably hired by someone further back, rather than themselves initiating the crime.

PAUL: So their personal motivation was just money, the hiring to do it as opposed to some political motivate?

BRENTON: I would guess so. I would guess that is the situation.

PAUL: OK. How much faith to you put in these arrests or the belief that they may have the correct suspects?

BRENTON: Well, that's a very difficult question to answer. There, obviously, have been a lot of allegations the kremlin itself is responsible for the murder. I find those allegations implausible. As you said earlier, the fact that Alexandra Botinikof went on the United States to announce the arrests is a sign of how determined to be seen to dealing with the crime.

Now, if they are responsible for the crime, then they will have checked up whoever they can grab. Even if they are not responsible for the crime, they are likely to have moved pretty vigorously and without too much concern for how much of evidence they have got to find someone to blame.

PAUL: So let's say that this was a murder for hire and, again, we do not know that to be the case, but because you say it is not unusual there, how often do people who might be found and arrested in a case like this who have been hire to murder, do they ever turn over information about who hired them?

BRENTON: Well, there is not much recent evidence of them doing so. I think the recent precedent is across the murder of an opposition journalist back when I was ambassador. She was killed in about 2006, 2007. Her killers were caught and sentenced, but it's clear those killers were for hire and what has never happened has been an investigation which has produced the people who hired them.

PAUL: All right, Sir Tony Brenton, appreciate your perspective as always. Thanks for being here.

JOHNS: Closer to home, there is new communications audio that is now out in the case of a police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: Shots fired. Shots fired.

UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: Twenty-five shots fired.

UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: Twenty-five. Got an ambulance.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JOHNS: Just ahead, hear how it all unfolded the night of the shooting.

Plus, a dolphin trainer accused of abusing animals turns up dead. What police say they think happened to him.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOHNS: Here's a look at some other stories developing right now. Police in Madison, Wisconsin, have released the dispatch audio from a police shooting Friday night that left an unarmed black teenager dead. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: I look for a male black -- teens outside -- in front of cars, 19 is of age, named Tony Robinson. R17 is no longer on the scene. Apparently Tony hit one of his friends. No weapons seen. I got a same call for the suspect when in fact, the police in the street tried to strangle another patron.

UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: Shots fired.

UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: Shots fired.

UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: Twenty-five shots fired.

UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: Twenty-five shots fired.

UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: Got an ambulance at least one.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

JOHNS: This is about the case of 19-year-old Tony Robinson who died after being shot by a white police officer while he was responding to what was reported as a disturbance call.

PAUL: Dispatchers received several 911 calls that night where callers claimed Robinson, who did have a criminal history, we have learned, was yelling at people and he was jumping in front of cars. You heard part of it there in the 911 call.

In the meantime, several dozen protesters took to the street and chanting black lives matter and that was the slogan in the deaths of unarmed African-Americans.

Next hour we will have a live report from Madison and we will try to learn a little bit more about Robinson's background and why police say you know what? His background doesn't matter.

JOHNS: A Spanish dolphin trainer accused on social media of abusing animals has been found dead. Jose Luis Barbero was found inside of his car. The Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta had hired him to become its vice president, but that was put on hold once grainy viral video triggered those abuse allegations. They say his death is being treated as a suicide.

PAUL: All right, did you remember to set your clocks ahead before going to bed last night because it is 6:25 right now. Joe is going, yes, I know. I missed the hour of sleep.

Today is the start of Daylight Saving Time in most of the United States. All of us in Hawaii and Arizona, you get to stay where you are. Those are the exceptions. This is usually a good time to replace batteries in the devices such as smoke detectors and maybe alarm clocks to be on the safe side?

JOHNS: If you're waking up wondering why the show is on at this hour, you're probably waking up late.

New details about the night Malaysia Flight 370 vanished without a trace. One interesting fact that came out of the first interim report, a lot of chaos and confusion when the plane disappeared, but no immediate urgency. We are sifting through hundreds of pages in that report.

PAUL: But first, ISIS may soon be expanding its reach as Boko Haram pledges allegiance to the Islamic State. So could the two groups actually work together and do it well? We are going to delve into this potential alliance.

JOHNS: But first this week's "One to Watch" series, examining the art of commercial dance. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: From the tap to the chest, the jitter bug to the twist. Most popular dances began life as underground sensations in America's Afro-American neighborhoods. Every decade it seems these communities create something fresh and vibrant. Pop stars have been long tap into this long hidden treasure chest of moves and often transforming them into worldwide crazes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Michael did not create the moonwalk. The moonwalk was something that was done on every street corner in America. Twerking and bootie dancing, they have done that in New Orleans for the last 20 years. You know, this is one guy named Big Fredda.

I remember he was a little upset because he was like, wow, I've been doing that forever and Miley Cyrus comes on TV and doesn't do it the right way. Because I'm trying to keep up with the latest dance, you know? Like the nay-nay is the latest dance. I don't know why they call it that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: L.A. south central ghetto is where it started. One of its residents, Tommy the Clown is credited with creating the clowning style which evolved into crumping, the dance style that defined it. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here, you struggle. It's a struggle. These kids go through so much and broken homes, single parents, gang violence, drugs and stuff. It's a lot of anger could be built up that they are able to release through the form of dance.

They battle one-by-one. Somebody through fire and somebody through the air and literally tear your head off without touching you on the dance floor and the crowd is going to be the judge.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PAUL: You can check out the full show at CNN.com/onestowatch.

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