The investigation has all the ingredients of those espionage stories that fire up crowds. In a six-page article that appeared in the weekly magazine Paris Match, dated Dec. 18, the successful French writer Marc Dugain comes back on the mystery surrounding the Boeing 777, flight MH370 of Malaysia Airlines, that disappeared on March 8, 2014.
According to the author, a number of pieces of evidence would indicate that the aircraft that transported 239 passengers crashed not far from Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean which harbors a sophisticated U.S. military intelligence base. A theory that the U.S. has always rejected.
For his investigation, Marc Dugain, who was the boss of the small airline company Proteus Airlines before becoming a novelist, collected testimonies from inhabitants of the archipelago neighboring the Maldives. They confirm having seen a plane flying abnormally toward Diego Garcia on that famous March 8. “I saw a huge plane flying above us at low altitude. It made a lot of noise. It made a south-east turn and continued at the same altitude. I saw red and blue streaks on a white color (the colors of the Malaysia Airlines company),” reports a fisherman from the Kudahuvadhoo island, further south of the archipelago. Several other witnesses give the same account, but the authorities still refused to believe their story.
Airline pirates? Hackers? A fire?
In fact, for Marc Dugain, the hypothesis which indicates that the plane was hijacked by airline pirates or, even more sophisticated, by computer hackers remains plausible. The author points out that, in 2006, Boeing filed “a patent for remote control access from a computer connected either inside or outside.” With such a technology, “it is theoretically possible that this plane was hijacked using the computer program on board.”*
Another possibility brought forth by the writer: a fire could have started on the plane which would have pushed the crew members to deactivate the device and, thus, all systems of communication with the ground. A foreign object found two weeks after the aircraft went missing off the Maldives could validate this thesis.
According to aeronautics experts who were able to analyze photographs of this discovery before soldiers could seize them, it could be of a fire extinguisher from the Boeing 777. “Given that it could float means that it was obviously empty, indicating that it was automatically activated during a fire,” writes Marc Dugain. The authorities in charge of the investigations never reported this finding. It could at least back the scenario according to which the aircraft continued its trajectory because its pilots and all its passengers died by asphyxiation. “There are two similar examples where planes continued their route while nobody had survived on board,” specifies Marc Dugain.
Lack of transparency
Still, for the novelist-investigator, the reasons which led to the plane deviating from its trajectory matter less than the direction taken. If Boeing 777 was heading toward Diego Garcia as he suspects it, there would be several possibilities, including that of a destruction ordered by the American military, who would fear an attack similar to those of Sept. 11 by seeing the Boeing moving towards its base on Diego Garcia.
Nine months after the tragedy, the author is indeed astonished by the lack of the investigators’ urgency to look for answers on this side of the Indian Ocean. According to him, the investigations carried out until today were still content to follow the only explanations offered by Inmarsat, a British satellite company known for being very close to the intelligence services.
According to Marc Dugain, the lack of consideration, or the confiscation of some of the findings, as well as the inability of the intelligence services that are equipped with very advanced technology to detect a 63-meter long aircraft proves that there is a certain lack of transparency.
“The fact that the authorities ignored these clues make me think that they know much more than they are willing to say,” he asserts before concluding that “someone knows, it is the only conviction that emerges from this investigation.”
*The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.
What a bunch of nonsense.