As we approach the tenth anniversary of the 2014 disappearance of flight 370, Malaysian Airlines, we are getting the usual barrage of media speculation about the alleged mystery and its possible causes.
Yet for me at the time, as a contributor to an Asian news service, there was no mystery. Two UK dailies had run a report from Malaysia saying that the pilot was a devout admirer of the much-victimised Malaysian politician, Ibrahim Anwar, and may have deliberately crashed the plane and its passengers in protest over government use of another rigged court judgement against him.
The intelligent and popular Anwar had already served six years in solitary confinement. Now they would send him back for another six years.
I wrote the story and it was published. But my story and, I assume, other similar stories all seem to have been obscured by the incredibility factor and by the rush of other news and speculation at the time – secret airports in Kazakhstan, terrorist hijackers and so on.
Since then more detailed investigations seem to have confirmed much of the original story – that the pilot must have been fully in control, that he deliberately chose the plane’s course, and that for some reason must deliberately have crashed the plane. But even this information has been partly obscured by constant rehashes of the search for the plane, the anguish of the families, and so on.
Fortunately the discovery of plane debris on the other side of the Indian ocean has killed the Kazakhstan speculation.
The story as I had it has since gained from report that the pilot had actually been seen at the courthouse on the day of the rigged judgement, and had gone directly from there to the airport where he was supposed to leave for China.
Instead he doubled back over Malaysia before heading out to the ocean. Why?
If I may add my own two pence worth of speculation the answer would be this: He went back to send a message to the Malaysian authorities – free Anwar or I will crash the plane.
The authorities did not want to take him seriously, and the rest is history.
But part of that history is the strange delays that occurred when said authorities should have been investigating why the plane flew over Malaysia and then over the ocean.
May I suggest that they did not have to investigate. They already knew. Their problem since then up till today is what to do about it.
Gregory Clark was the first postwar Australian diplomat trained in Chinese, with postings to Hong Kong, Moscow and the UN before retiring in protest against the Vietnam War. After PhD studies at the ANU he became Japan correspondent for The Australian. A spell in Canberra’s Prime Ministers department led to professorships at Tokyo’s Sophia University and presidency of Tama University, before becoming co-founder of the very successful English language Akita Kokusai Daigaku. He has now retired to Latin America (Peru) and Kiwi fruit growing in Boso peninsular south of Tokyo.
His works include ‘In Fear of China’ (1969) and several books in Japan on education and foreign policy.
He used to speak Chinese and Russian with fluency. He now speaks Japanese and Spanish.
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