The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, which took off from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the early hours of March 8, 2014, has not yet landed. The truth of what happened, neither. That flight MH370 vanished with all the passengers, without leaving a trace. More than two hundred affected families – the vast majority of them Chinese – have the feeling that their pain has been played with since then. That they have not been facing a great mystery for ten years, but rather a great concealment.
In the absence of an official conclusion, “the greatest enigma in the history of aviation” has given rise to all kinds of hypotheses. Some have been collected in dozens of books and even television series. One on Netflix, British, and another, this year, on France 2, titled “The Missing Truth.”
Last Sunday, a gathering of families in Kuala Lumpur demanded transparency from the authorities and that they resume the search for the device. Despite its length of more than sixty meters, the fuselage of the Boeing has never appeared. Although every effort was made to track it in the immense quadrant of the Indian Ocean indicated by the Inmarsat satellite company, west of the Australian coast, nothing was found.
An American firm, which has already tried to locate the remains on two occasions, says it now has the appropriate robotic technology to achieve this. The Malaysian government says it is open to studying it, as long as the bill is conditional on the success of the mission.
It took the Kuala Lumpur government four years to write an official report on what happened, which after five hundred pages acknowledges that “this team has been unable to determine the real cause of the disappearance of MH370.” He concludes, in any case, that the person in command of the plane – presumably the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, with marital problems – turned off the transponder (which indicates the location) and turned around shortly after entering Vietnamese airspace, heading towards towards the northwest (Penang and the Andaman Islands). Then, according to Inmarsat, towards the south.
Although the Malaysian report does not clarify who was piloting the aircraft, it states that “the intervention of a third party cannot be excluded.” Something that would leave the door open to a kidnapping, an attack or an attack. French justice, which has not closed the case, defines what happened as “terrorism.” No “mystery”. The Chinese justice system has also declared itself competent, at the request of more than forty family members.
In France, one of the faces of the case is that of Ghyslain Wattrelos, who lost his wife and two of his three minor children. Wattrelos, who was vice president of the multinational cement company Lafarge and worked in Beijing, left one of the best-paid jobs in France to focus on the case.
As director of international strategy in a multinational that operates in very conflictive countries, the senior executive was familiar with French intelligence and claims to have been introduced to a spy, who would have told him that “the Americans know everything that happened.” He has also expressed it in front of the cameras. His goal, he says, is not money, but “the truth.” “Know who killed them and why. If it was about preventing 9/11 we also have the right to know.”
As the French journalist, Florence de Changy, recalls, two days later the Cope Tiger maneuvers between this country, Thailand and the United States began at the Changi naval base (sic), next to the Singapore airport. One or two American AWACS planes had to monitor everything that moved in advance, according to this Le Monde correspondent in Hong Kong, who has dedicated two books to MH370. According to her, the plane could have been shot down off the coast of Vietnam – in no case in the Indian Ocean – although the possible reasons she provides are not very convincing.
Wattrelos, who has also dedicated a book to the matter, says he has “no doubt that he was shot down.” According to him, the French president at the time, François Hollande, should also have received all the information, although he never wanted to receive it.
It should be noted that two Iranians with stolen passports were traveling on the plane – one Italian, the other Austrian – but it seems that their objective was to fly to Amsterdam, and then request asylum in Germany.
According to the French journalist mentioned above, according to the flight log, the plane was loaded with no less than four and a half tons of mangosteens (a cargo that also appeared by default for the following days, although the season for this fruit had not even started. ). It should be noted that the small plane in which Pakistani dictator Zia ul Haq crashed in the 1980s was carrying a box of mangoes that was considered suspicious. More interestingly, the Malaysian Boeing 777 was carrying a load of two and a half tons of “electronic material.”
In fact, one of the most delusional hypotheses is the one that links the disappearance of the aircraft to sensitive cargo that could not reach China in any way. Those who did not arrive, in any case, were the twenty employees of the American semiconductor company Freescale, almost all of them Chinese engineers.
For undisclosed reasons, twenty-four hours after the disappearance, the FBI seized the flight simulator at the Malaysian pilot’s home. His findings have not been made public, while the information provided by the Malaysian government has only served to infuriate China, due to its delay, insufficiency or uselessness. The military, despite their radars, clarified even less. Some countries, nothing.
A nephew of the pilot questioned a Malaysian government minister. “They are all collateral victims,” ??he managed to get out of her. A relief for those who saw how the pilot became a suspect, despite a social profile at the antipodes of jihadism. Even the current prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, was slow to acknowledge that he knew him, as she is a relative of his daughter-in-law and a supporter of his party. That week, however, Anwar had been sentenced to prison.
To make matters worse, the pilot’s wife, with whom he had three children, had abandoned him the day before, fed up with his infidelities. The angle of possible depression and personal responsibility has been favored by the media in the country of Inmarsat (UK) and the country of Boeing (USA). The script, in this case, would be the same as that of German Wings flight 9525.
A hypothesis not even mentioned in the British Netflix documentary was, however, one of the most popular for months. According to this, the pilot (with or without a kidnapper) would have set course for the strategic US base of Diego García, on an atoll in the Indian Ocean.
The world has continued to turn since then. Four months later, Malaysia Airlines saw another of its planes shot down over the rebellious Donbass, with accusations being exchanged. The airline soon went bankrupt and was renationalized. After even changing its logo, it has survived, not only those days, but also the pandemic.
For his part, the Malaysian Prime Minister at the time, Najib Razak, achieved another astonishing disappearance. That of several billion dollars from the sovereign fund. He has been in prison for this since 2022 and will not be released before six years, after the remission of half of the sentence by the previous king.
Meanwhile, Inmarsat, privatized twenty-five years ago and with deals with the Pentagon that predate what was narrated, has since been awarded very succulent contracts with the US Navy. For one billion dollars, a year and a half ago , and for 578 million, somewhat before.
On the contrary, Lafarge, Wattrelos’ former multinational, saw a lawsuit being orchestrated against it in the US for paying bribes to the Islamic State, in order to continue operating its plant in Syria. Pursued by the US attorney general’s office since 2018, the French firm agreed to pay compensation of 777 million dollars. However, last December he saw how four hundred Yazidis living in the US, including the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nadia Murad, sued him again.
The Boeing 777 is possibly at the bottom of the sea, with 239 missing. What torments families is that someone knows where, how and why. But reasons of state force us to maintain a combination of thick silence and distractions that has lasted for ten years. Until death – or declassification – do them part.
