Missing Malaysia Airlines jet: A terror attack aimed at China?

It looks increasingly probable now that the still missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 that took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on early Saturday became a victim of terrorists. From the circumstantial information available this far it looks extremely likely that this was indeed a terror attack, possibly aimed at China. [caption id=“attachment_1427955” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Reuters[/caption] The theory of some “Asian looking” suspects causing mischief by boarding the ill-fated plane with stolen passports has been trashed by Malaysian civil aviation minister Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, but that may well be a ploy to keep everything under wraps till investigators yield a breakthrough. One should not forget that China has experienced several unexplained and unprovoked attacks in the recent past which are being viewed as terror attacks and being investigated as such. Moreover, the manner in which these attacks have taken place on Chinese soil seems to have many similarities with the events pertaining to the sudden disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane. Here are the potential clues suggesting the China factor in the incident. 1. The passenger manifest list. The plane had 239 people on board, including 12 crew members. Though the 227 passengers on board were from 14 nationalities – 38 Malaysians, seven Indonesians, five Indians, four French and three each from the United States and Australia – at least 152 were from China. The fact that a large chunk of the passengers were from China could not have been lost on the perpetrators. 2. The modus operandi. The MH 370 flight episode has come barely a week after the 1 March weird terror incident in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming in which knife-wielding assailants killed at least 29 innocent people at a train station. 3. The apparent lone wolf strategy. The needle of suspicion points to two men (initially described as having “Asian features”) who boarded the plane on stolen passports of two Europeans Christian Kozel (Austria) and Luigi Maraldi (Italy). The insinuation is that the two men, who bought one-way tickets together for the flight from Pattaya (Thailand), carried a lethal bomb into the plane which exploded when the aircraft was cruising at an altitude of 35,000 feet about an hour after the flight took off. If it is so, technically it would make them two wolves, though the operation would fit into the category of lone wolf terror operations. Such operations are too difficult to be tracked, pre-empted or even investigated and even the motive is hard to be defined as the perpetrators themselves perish. The Kunming attack bore similar signatures. 4. The Chinese Uighurs’ connection. The Muslim Uighur community of China has emerged as prime suspects in the recent terror attacks against China. The Uighurs, an ethnic group which is one of China’s 56 ethnic minorities, is in majority in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. The Uighurs had a brief taste of independence as East Turkestan and still harbour ambitions of becoming an independent state. 5. The Thailand angle. The two Europeans on whose stolen passports the suspects had boarded the plane had reported theft of their passports in Thailand in past two years. This theft had been reported and duly incorporated in the huge Interpol database of more than 40 million lost and stolen travel documents. However, the Malaysian authorities failed to detect in time the fact that two passengers were trying to sneak into MH 370 on stolen passports. The possibility of complicity of Thai officials cannot be ruled out. Thailand has long been one of the contact points of the Chinese Uighurs. The mystery can be solved only after the missing plane’s wreckage is found and the Black Box and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) are recovered. Once the plane’s wreckage is located, it would be interesting to see how far the wreckage is dispersed for there will inevitably be a pattern in the spread of the wreckage. If a plane explodes mid-air at an altitude of 35,000 feet its wreckage will be spread over scores of square kilometers. If the plane is downed because of a mechanical failure, its wreckage will be dispersed in much smaller area. The truth should be out soon considering that 34 planes and 40 ships from ten countries are scouring the seas to search for the missing plane’s wreckage. (The writer is a Firstpost columnist and strategic analyst who tweets @Kishkindha.)