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"points toward the involvement of one or more state actors" I agree ... and so I think it's become useful to identify the skills and knowledge of each of the j

• etherael 13y ago
  20 freescale semiconductor employees on board.
  • smoyer 13y ago
    Would an embargoed country like Iran consider them worth the risk? It would be a pretty serious international incident if they were found out. And if you hold the passengers too long, you can't claim "some crazy terrorist/spy/actor" was working without authorization and here are your people back.
  • nutjob123 13y ago
    Wow, thats scary. Some countries would kill to have engineers with specific skill sets. Maybe these guys were worth it.
  • prewett 13y ago
    All that effort, and still no guarantee that they will actually work with you. Some may be willing to die, others might stealthily sabotage the product, etc. And if you can provide 20 freescale engineers with what they need to actually make something, you can probably just hire people normally.
  • knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    And? Finish the thought.
  • maaku 13y ago
    And so "they" hijack a plane to get these guys? Wouldn't it be easier to just kidnap them at gunpoint from their hotel? The freescale connection is a total red herring. Either they intended to land/crash the plane somewhere and failed, or the plane was the target and it's now sitting in some deserted desert airstrip getting retrofitted for whatever mission it is intended for.
• StandardFuture 13y ago
  Couldn't it maybe have been a piece of cargo that was the target and not a person? Perhaps, something that a passenger was traveling with?
  • smoyer 13y ago
    Good point ... so someone should be going through the cargo manifests. If it was travelling with a person but as luggage, there's no guarantee the airline would know about it.
  • brk 13y ago
    But you'd have to know that cargo was going to be on board beforehand. From the sounds of it, the pilots were well prepared to execute this plan. Assuming of course this is even remotely what really happened. Passenger lists would be known in advance. My guess is if they wanted some piece of material/cargo enough to pull off an operation like this, they would have just taken the cargo itself. It would presumably be something so valuable/unique that the owner wasn't going to just file a "missing baggage" claim. If it was about cargo, it would also seem that it would be more efficient to steal the cargo, and then blow up the plane. That would make the original owner of the item believe it was permanently lost/destroyed vs. being in this unknown state, and possibly giving the owner time to react or inform other governments. Provided that the plane was deliberately flown in-tact to an unknown location, my personal guess would be that this was about 1 or more individuals on the plane specifically. I also doubt it's about the plane itself. This specific plane is now a highly visible piece of equipment, and it would be fairly easy to obtain planes with similar load-bearing capacity in less obvious means.
• jusben1369 13y ago
  Isn't this an awfully complex way to get to one individual? Can't you just nab him at the airport at either end if you're so sure he's on the flight?
  • iambateman 13y ago
    If you're trying to get one individual or even a group, STEALING A PLANE out of the air and drawing international scrutiny seems like a terrifically inefficient way of doing it.
• broolstoryco 13y ago
  Satoshi was on board!
  • snom380 13y ago
    As was the Rotschild family!
• exelius 13y ago
  Or they were hijacking a plane to stuff it full of chemical weapons / radioactive material (think dirty bomb) with the intent of flying it over a major city and detonating it. It would be hard to do it in a western nation, but if you were aiming at a city near the "frontier" of India, Pakistan, etc. a bad actor could likely execute the plan before the jets they scramble could intercept the jet. There's a lot of bad stuff you could do with a flying metal tube capable of carrying 200,000 lbs of whatever you can get your hands on. I don't think it was a state actor though. If it was a state actor, who would it have been? My bets are on Pakistan if it was a state actor; they're one of the only ones with a sophisticated enough intelligence organization to be able to hide a plane like this. In many cases, it's hard to tell where the ISI ends and the Taliban begins. Though the same could be said for Iran and Hezbollah, though the Iranian government has taken a reconciliatory tone with the west as of late and I don't think they'd risk it. It likely wasn't North Korea; the social engineering required would be too high and the North Koreans are largely incompetent at covert operations outside their borders due to their xenophobia. I don't think many other states with the capability to do something like this would risk it; the amount of publicity on this is too high. If the plane was hijacked and successfully landed somewhere (and that's a big if -- IMO it's just as likely that it's at the bottom of the ocean and will never be found) it was probably a coordinated effort between a terrorist group and rogue elements within the Pakistani ISI. I don't think the older pilot was involved; there's been a lot made of his links to a controversial opposition leader in Malaysia, but his ideology doesn't align with any of the terror groups (Anwar Ibrahim is considered a liberal reformer) and all of the "controversy" around him is corruption-related -- not the type of thing that would cause someone to shift toward radical Islam.
  • ianhawes 13y ago
    Except your plan has one fatal flaw: assuming the plane was stolen to be used as a missile. If this were ISI or a state level actor, the absolute riskiest part would be hijacking a plane in flight with passengers. You risk them uprising, getting the word out about the hijacking, and then you'd have to execute them once you land. Why not steal an empty plane at an airport or buy an older plane through an intermediary?
    • 13y ago