The captain of the crashed Air India jet is likely to have cut off the fuel supply before it went down in Ahmedabad, US officials believe.

According to a report published on Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal quoting sources close to United States officials’ early assessment of evidence, the black box audio recording of the last conversation between the two pilots indicates that the captain might have turned off the switches controlling the flow of fuel to the plane’s engines.

Air India Flight 171, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, vanished from the skies above Ahmedabad and crashed into a residential neighbourhood just