Monday, March 17, 2014

Did terrorists take control of Flight 370? Ilana Lemack

 Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak, told reporters over the weekend that "deliberate" action by somebody on board accounted for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 veering off course. Could the missing Malaysia plane be an act of terrorism? Why would someone want to hijack a plane? What were their intentions? What would they benefit from doing that? The al Qaeda-affiliated group, Jemaah Islamiyah, has a presence in Malaysia as well as in the Philippines and Indonesia. However, the group has been under law enforcement pressure for more than a decade after it bombed nightclubs on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002, killing more than 200 people, mostly Western tourists. Would Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamist militant group, target for attack the air carrier of a majority Muslim country on which quite a number of Muslims were likely traveling? Wouldn't it be more reasonable for them to want to harm the western countries as apposed to eastern? A terrorist group that might have a motive is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a separatist group in China founded by Uighurs that has had some historical ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban. But the plane wasn't diliberately crashed into a building and there is no known ultimatum that any hijackers would propose. If the diversion of Malaysia Airlines 370 was not an act of terrorism, the other likely scenarios are a pilot suicide attempt, the piracy of the plane for some kind of economic reason or the commandeering of the aircraft by someone with an idiosyncratic motive that will only become clear over time.

This is very interesting because I really did think that this missing plane was an act of terrorism, however after reading this i am second guessing that assumption. The fact that we don't know anything about this plane is proving that it was not a hijacking. Dont you think that we would hear of something the hijackers want by now? I also do not thhink that this plane is missing because of an economic issue because of the fact that they cannot locate it on any device...
I dont know if this is true but i heard my mom say that the airline figured out that 2 passengers on the missing plane boarding the plane using fake/stolen passports. If this is true...this does push towards the hijacking...although i hope in a few days/weeks we will know more information. 

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/17/opinion/bergen-flight-370-terrorism-role/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

2 comments:

  1. I wrote about this in its early stages of the developing mystery and found in strange that two passengers on board were flying from stolen passports. Its suspicious however we cant judge someones actions without knowing why they took them. Furthermore, how could we know after they were on the plane that the passports were stolen and not before security or anything other reasons?

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