It looks as though…
…the two men traveling on stolen passports may not have had any relation to the downing of the Malaysian flight, at least if this story is true:
Benjaporn Krutnait, owner of the Grand Horizon Travel agency, said the Iranian, a long-term business contact who she knew only as “Mr Ali”, first asked her to book cheap tickets to Europe for the two men on March 1. She initially reserved one of the men on a Qatar Airways flight and the other on Etihad.
But the tickets expired when Benjaporn did not hear back from Ali. When he contacted her again on Thursday, she rebooked the men on the Malaysia Airlines flight through Beijing because it was the cheapest available.
Their final destinations were Copenhagen and Frankfurt. So it sounds as though no particular flight was specified, they were planning to split up later on, and which flights they would take to reach those European cities was left up to the travel agent, who was instructed merely to book them on the cheapest ones. That would be an awfully strange way to plan an airplane bombing.
What’s more, a person claiming to be friends of the two men says they were young Iranians looking to emigrate to Denmark and Germany, and that one had a mother living in Frankfurt. That ties in quite well with the report from the travel agent about the way the tickets were reserved, including the fact that their final destinations were different, and that there was a shady Iranian middleman. My guess is that the middleman procured the stolen passports, as well.
If this is all true—and I’d say it’s more likely to be true than not, because it neatly fits the fact situation as presented—it’s highly unlikely that these particular men had anything to do with the disaster that befell the Malaysian flight. They were probably just looking for a better life away from Iran, and willing to pay for fake passports to get it. Fate intervened.
[ADDENDUM: This article claims to show a photo of the younger Iranian, the one who had plans to be met by his mother in Germany. Very sad; only nineteen years old. One of hundreds of tragic stories.
The article also contains a strange and spooky detail about cellphones: that relatives claim that many of the passengers’ smartphones are still ringing. I’m wondering how much of what is currently being reported is actually true.]
I’ve noted that the early reporting on almost any major violent incident, particularly possible terrorist attacks, is full of pieces of information that turn out to be just not true, supposedly good information that muddies the waters, information that sends readers off in seemingly dozens of different directions, and that, in the end, makes it very hard, if not impossible, to find out what actually happened.
Is this morass of confusion just the inevitable nature of reality, is this just plain ol’ bad reporting, or something far more sinister, the result of the filtering of actual reality though a distorting agenda–think Walter Duranty, the New York Times, and Stalin’s man made famine in the Ukraine that they covered up and denied–is this some percentage, perhaps a high percentage, of deliberate disinformation, or a confusing (and perhaps a deliberately confusing) combination of some or all of these things?
I’m not really sure, but such confusion seems to be increasingly common in today’s news reporting, making finding the truth harder and harder, and leading to the growth of supposed “conspiracy theories” that may, in fact, be much closer to the truth than the “official” reporting.
Given all of the outright lies, coverups, and selective inattention, the omnipresent Leftist ideological bias and conformity to current Leftist talking points and positions, the disinformation spread by the MSM in the service of Obama & Co. and the Left, it is getting increasingly hard to believe anything that one finds in the MSM as being the “truth.”
If this part of the story turns out to be true then it might be even more tragic for the families of these two men as there will most likely be no death benefits paid out since they technically weren’t on board.
Mr Ali should be put out of business. This may be another way for future jihadists to infiltrate other countries. Anyway, it is an illegal way to travel.
all very sad
Makes me wonder if some group has just gotten themselves an intercontinental missile.
The Left naturally defaults to disinformation to help their Islamic Jihadist allies. Nobody needs to order them to do so. Just as nobody had to order someone to hate the Jews in WWII. It happens naturally. The slave thinks it is free.
Excellent point, Ymarsakar.