First officer’s phone registers at Penang

Royal Malaysian Police reported that the first officer’s mobile phone registered with a cell tower on Penang at 17:52:27 UTC. The aircraft was then on the westbound primary-radar track. A phone registering at altitude is a proximity event, not evidence of an attempted call, and it does not locate the aircraft more precisely than the radar already did. It does independently corroborate that 9M-MRO was in the Penang area about half an hour after vanishing from secondary radar — a useful cross-check on the military track.