Former
airline boss and famous French author Marc Dugain argued Thursday that there
had been a cover-up in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370,
speculating that the passenger jet could have been hacked and then shot down by
the US.
Dugain, a
well-respected French author, argues that the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people
crashed near Diego Garcia, a British island in the middle of the Indian Ocean
used as a strategic air force and intelligence base by the US military, in the
six-page article in Paris Match.
The US has
always officially denied that flight MH370 came anywhere near Diego Garcia.
The latest
theory into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on March 8,
2014 has all the ingredients of a spy thriller and has grabbed the French
public’s attention.
The former
boss of Proteus Airlines travelled to the neighbouring Maldives where residents
told local media that they had seen an airliner fly in the direction of Diego
Garcia. Their claims were promptly dismissed by the authorities.
“I saw a
huge plane fly over us at low altitude,” a fisherman on Kudahuvadhoo island
told Dugain. “I saw red and blue stripes on a white background” – the colours
of Malaysia Airlines. Other witnesses confirmed the sighting.
Fire on
board?
Dugain
speculates – adding to the numerous other existing hypotheses about what
happened to flight MH370 – that a modern aircraft such as Malaysia Airlines'
Boeing 777 could have been hijacked by a hacker.
“In 2006,
Boeing patented a remote control system using a computer placed inside or
outside the aircraft,” he noted. This technology lead Dugain to the idea of a
“soft” remote hijacking.
But the
writer also suggests that a fire could have led the crew to deactivate
electrical devices, including transmission systems.
Whatever
the initial reasons for leaving its flight path, Dugain suspects that the plane
then headed to Diego Garcia, where a number of scenarios may have played out –
including the US Air Force shooting it down for fear of a September 11-style attack.
Dugain met
the mayor of neighbouring Baarah island, who showed him pictures of a strange
device found on a beach two weeks after the plane had disappeared and before
the Maldives military seized it. Two aviation experts and a local military
officer concluded that the object was a Boeing fire extinguisher. Dugain points
out that for the extinguisher to have floated, it must have been empty, having
been automatically triggered by a fire. He adds that precedent exists in which
fires on board aircraft caused all passengers and crew to die of asphyxiation,
while the plane’s automated systems extinguished the blaze and kept it in the
air.
Cover-up
The rest of
his article draws more conclusions from the information that has remained
buried than from new facts.
The writer
notes that the search operation in the southern Indian Ocean was based on
satellite data from UK-based Inmarsat – the last organisation to receive a
signal from the airliner – which is "very close to intelligence
agencies".
For Dugain,
the suppression of testimonies from the Maldives, the unlikely event that Diego
Garcia’s US intelligence officers “equipped with the best technology in the
world may have ‘lost’ a 63-metre-long object”, and the secrecy surrounding the
cargo in the plane’s hold all point towards a large-scale cover-up.
So does the
friendly advice of a “Western intelligence officer” – a British one, Dugain
said in a radio interview on Thursday – who cautioned him against the “risks”
of investigating the flight’s disappearance and suggested that he “let time do
its work” instead.
The
writer’s conclusion is that “the only firm belief left from this investigation
is that someone knows”.
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