The Boeing 777 of Malaysia Airlines, which on March 9, 2014 in the morning took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, has not yet landed. The truth of the facts, neither. That flight MH370 vanished with the entire passage, leaving no 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 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 in television series. One on Netflix, British, and another, this year, on France 2, entitled La vérité disparue (The missing truth).
On March 3, a gathering of families in Kuala Lumpur demanded transparency from the authorities and that they resume the search for the device. Despite its more than sixty meters, the fuselage of the Boeing has never appeared. Although every effort was once made to trace it to the vast quadrant of the Indian Ocean pointed out by the satellite company Inmarsat west of the Australian coast, it was nowhere to be found nothing.
A US firm that has already tried to locate the remains twice says it now has the right robotics technology to do so. The Malaysian Government says it is open to studying it, as long as the bill is linked to the success of the mission.
The Kuala Lumpur government took four years to write a report on the events, 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), made a U-turn shortly after entering the ‘Vietnamese airspace and headed northwest. Then, according to Inmarsat, towards the south.
Although the Malaysian report does not clarify who was piloting the aircraft, it says that “the intervention of a third party cannot be excluded”. Something that would leave the door open to a kidnapping, attack or bombing. French justice, which has not filed the case, defines the events as “terrorism”. Nothing “mystery”. Chinese justice 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 lived in Beijing, left one of France’s highest-paid jobs to focus on the case.
As director of international strategy at a multinational operating in conflict countries, the senior executive was familiar with French intelligence and claims to have been introduced to a spy who reportedly told him that “the Americans know everything that goes to pass”. This is what he expressed in front of the cameras. His goal, he says, is not money, but “the truth”. “Knowing who killed them and why. If an attempt was made to prevent a 11-S, we also have the right to know.”
As French journalist Florence de Changy recalls, two days later the Cope Tiger maneuvers between that country, Thailand and the United States began at the Changi naval base, next to Singapore airport. One or two Awacs from the United States must have already heard everything moving in time, according to this Le Monde correspondent in Hong Kong, who has devoted 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 convincing.
Wattrelos, who has dedicated a book to the issue, says he has “no doubt that he was shot down”. According to him, the French president at the time, François Hollande, must also have received all the information, although he never wanted to receive it.
It should be noted that there were two Iranians on the plane with stolen passports – one Italian, the other Austrian – but it seems that their aim was to fly to Amsterdam, and then seek asylum in Germany.
According to the French journalist, the plane was loaded with no less than four and a half tons of mangosteens. It should be noted that the plane with which the Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq crashed in the eighties 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 delirious hypotheses is the one that links the disappearance of the aircraft to a sensitive cargo that could not reach China in any way. Those who did not come, in any case, were the twenty workers of the US 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. Their inquiries have not been made public, while the information provided by the Malaysian Government has only served to enrage China, because of the delay, insufficiency or futility. The military, despite their radars, made it even less clear.
A nephew of the pilot questioned a minister of the Malaysian Government. “They are all collateral victims”, he managed to start. A relief for those who saw how the pilot became a suspect, even though he had a social profile at the antipodes of jihadism. Even the current prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, was slow to admit that he knew him, because he was a relative of his daughter-in-law and a supporter of his party.
To make matters worse, the pilot’s wife, with whom he had three children, had left 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 (United Kingdom) and the country of Boeing (USA). The script, in this case, would be the same as for German Wings flight 9525.
One hypothesis not mentioned in the Netflix documentary is one that has been touted the most for months. According to this, the pilot (with or without a hijacker) would have set course for the strategic American base of Diego García, in an atoll in the Indian Ocean.
The Boeing 777 plane is possibly at the bottom of the sea, with 239 missing. What torments families is that someone knows where, how and why.
