US officials hold Air India captain responsible for crash

(Reuters): A cockpit recording of dialogue between the two pilots of the Air India flight that crashed last month supports the view that the captain cut the flow of fuel to the plane's engines, said a source briefed on US officials' early assessment of evidence.

The first officer was at the controls of the Boeing 787 and asked the captain why he moved the fuel switches into a position that starved the engines of fuel and requested that he restore the fuel flow, the source told Reuters on condition of anonymity because the matter remains under investigation.

The US assessment is not contained in a formal document, said the source, who emphasised the cause of the June 12 crash in Ahmedabad, the capital of western Indian state of Gujarat that killed 260 people, remains under investigation.

There was no cockpit video recording definitively showing which pilot flipped the switches, but the weight of evidence from the conversation points to the captain, according to the early assessment. Indian officials said investigation was ongoing and it remained too early to draw definitive conclusions.

India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), which is leading the investigation into the crash, said in a statement on Thursday that "certain sections of the international media are repeatedly attempting to draw conclusions through selective and unverified reporting."

The Wall Street Journal first reported similar information on Wednesday about the world's deadliest aviation accident in a decade. After that the Federation of Indian Pilots sent a legal notice to Reuters about a July 17 story published by the news agency which referenced the WSJ article.

A preliminary report released by the AAIB on Saturday said that one of the two pilots in the cockpit was heard on the voice recorder, asking the other why he cut off the fuel and "the other pilot responded that he did not do so."

The AAIB investigators did not identify which remarks were made by Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and which by First Officer Clive Kunder, who had total flying experience of 15,638 hours and 3,403 hours, respectively.