Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 2 (Reuters) – A U.S. Air Force jet that flew House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Malaysia left the country on Tuesday and flew near the Philippines, the site’s most-followed flight of the day Flightradar24 tracking. Reuters could not immediately confirm whether Pelosi or her delegation was on the SPAR19 flight, but authorities in the Philippines, a US ally, said no request had been received from the United States to visit or transit the country. The plane left Kuala Lumpur at 3:42 p.m. (0742 GMT) and flew east toward Borneo on a path that skirted the South China Sea. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register However, it was last seen on the tracker off the Philippines’ southernmost region of Mindanao, flying along the country’s eastern Pacific coast. Pelosi was expected to arrive in Taipei later Tuesday, sources said earlier. read more Like SPAR19, a second US Air Force plane arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday morning. According to Flightradar24, SPAR20 had not left the Malaysian capital. A visit to Taiwan by Pelosi, who is second in line for the US presidency and a long-time critic of China, will come amid worsening relations between Washington and Beijing. He has not confirmed whether he will visit the self-governing island that Beijing claims as its own. Both the Philippine Air Force and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said they had not received any information from the United States that Pelosi might land in the country on Tuesday. “DFA has not received any request from the US government or its embassy in Manila to transit and/or visit Speaker Pelosi in the Philippines as part of her current series of visits to the region,” DFA said in a text message to reporters. . As of 11:30 GMT, SPAR19 was flying just south of the Philippines, according to Flightradar24, on a track tracked by up to 300,000 people on its website. A normal flight from Kuala Lumpur to Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, would cross the South China Sea, with a typical flight time of under five hours. Since last week, China’s People’s Liberation Army has conducted various drills, including live-fire drills, in the South China Sea, Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea in a show of Chinese military might. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Reporting by Ebrahim Harris and Rozanna Latiff in Kuala Lumpur and Ryan Woo in Beijing. Additional reporting by Neil Jerome Morales in Manila. Edited by Martin Petty, William Maclean Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
