From what I understand, this was all done after 4 hours..if this person knew what he was doing, why wait four hours, if he didnt want the plane to be noticed on satellite, why not do it immediately? Or it could have been so much was going on at the time he forgot and realized “Oh sh*t I forgot to turn that off”
People do make mistakes. This might have been one of them.
iirc, there was a flight engineer (mechanic?) on board bound for a job in Bejing. Perhaps he was known to one of the pilots as an employee and they kept him alive for a while. Just a theory.