The Malaysian authorities have come under fire following conflicting accounts on the last known position of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 before it went missing.

The New York Times said the authorities had repeatedly said they were doing their best but Putrajaya and the airline had issued imprecise, incomplete and sometimes inaccurate information, with civilian officials contradicting military leaders.

Yesterday, on the fourth day of the search, the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) chief General Tan Sri Rodzali Daud confirmed that its Butterworth base had received a signal which showed that the missing Malaysia Airlines flight had turned back in South China Sea airspace on Saturday.

Malay-language daily Berita Harian had quoted Rodzali as saying that the signal received indicated that the plane followed its original route before it entered the airspace above the northern east coast of the peninsula.

"The last time the plane could be traced by an air control tower was near Pulau Perak, which is on the Strait of Malacca at 2.40am.

"After that, the signal from the plane was lost," Rodzali had said.

However, Rodzali today said he did not make that statement but had instead said: “the RMAF has not ruled out the possibility of an air turn back on a reciprocal heading before the aircraft vanished from the radar and this resulted in the search and rescue operations being widen to the vicinity of the waters off Penang.”

It was also reported that a Singaporean air traffic surveillance and control unit also picked up the signal that MH370 "made a turn back before it was reported to have climbed 1,000m from its original altitude at 10,000m”.

The plane, carrying 239 passengers of 14 nationalities and an all-Malaysian cabin crew, left the Kuala Lumpur International Airport for Beijing at 12.40am on Saturday.

It was earlier reported that the plane, a Boeing 777-200ER aircraft (registration number 9M-MRO), went missing about 1.30am while flying above the South China Sea between the Malaysian east coast and the southern coast of Vietnam.

The plane reportedly went off radar and its last known location was 065515 North (longitude) and 1033443 East (latitude).

The New York Times report said Rodzali's statement stunned aviation experts as well as officials in China, who had been told again and again that the authorities had lost contact with the plane more than an hour earlier, when it was on course over the Gulf of Thailand, east of the peninsula.

The latest information also caused an uproar on Chinese social media sites. “Malaysia, how could you hide something this big until now?” said one posting on Sina.com Weibo, a service similar to Twitter.

David Learmount, operations and safety editor at Flightglobal, a news and data service for the aviation sector, said the Malaysian government seemed evasive and confused, and he questioned why, if the remarks attributed to Rodzali were true, the government took so long to reveal evidence about a westwards flight path.

“The relatives of the people who’ve gone missing are being deprived of information about what’s happened to the airplane – that for me is the issue,” the New York Times quoted him as saying. “If somebody knows something and isn’t telling, that’s not nice under the circumstances."

Adding to the confusion, Tengku Sariffuddin Tengku Ahmad, spokesman for the Prime Minister’s Office, had said in a telephone interview that he had checked with senior military officials, who told him there was no evidence that the plane had re-crossed the Malaysian peninsula, only that it may have attempted to turn back, the paper said.

“As far as they know, except for the air turn-back, there is no new development,” Tengku Sariffuddin had apparently said, adding that the reported remarks by the air force chief were “not true.”

Adding to the confusion is a statement by Malaysia Airlines which said that authorities were “looking at a possibility” that the plane was headed to the Subang airport, which handles mainly domestic flights.

Also, if the flight had travelled west over the peninsula, as Rodzali had said, it would have flown very close to a beacon in Kota Baru operated by Flightradar24, a global tracking system for commercial aircraft.

Mikael Robertsson, the co-founder of Flightradar24, told the New York Times that the transponder on the jet never sent a signal to that receiver, which meant that if the plane did fly that way, its transponder had either been damaged or had been shut off.

“We see every aircraft that flies over there, even if it’s very, very low, so if it flew over there, the transponder was off,” he said.

A pilot can turn off the transponder, Robertsson said, and the fact that the last contact from MH370’s transponder came at roughly the same time that the cockpit crew stopped communicating with ground controllers by radio suggests that that was what had happened.

“I guess to me it sounds like they were turned off deliberately,” he was quoted as saying.

The inconsistencies continued with Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar contradicting an earlier statement by director-general of Civil Aviation Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman that five passengers who had checked in for flight MH370 had failed to board the aircraft.

Khalid had said yesterday that every passenger who had booked a ticket for the flight had boarded the plane.

"There were no passengers who checked in for the flight but failed to board," he had said at a press conference, adding that as such, no baggage was removed from the aircraft.

But Malaysia Airlines later issued a clarification, saying that there were four passengers who booked tickets on the flight but failed to check in at the airport or check any bags for the flight.

Meanwhile, a survey conducted by South China Morning Post newspaper on its website showed that a majority of respondents are dissatisfied with the Malaysian authorities' handling of the search for MH370.

An overwhelming 87% of respondents answered "no" when asked: "Are you satisfied with Malaysian authorities' information releases regarding the missing MH370 flight so far?"

However, the number of respondents is not stated. – March 12, 2014.

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