Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Vladimir Putin Behind Plane’s Disappearance And Later Shootdown Of MH17, Also?

Vladimir Putin may have been the mastermind behind both the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on March 8 of 2014 and the horrifying shootdown of another Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200, Flight MH17, just over four months later, a prominent aviation expert suggested Wednesday. Jeff Wise, author and frequent television commentator on Flight MH370 and other air disasters, wrote that an investigative report into the MH17 shootdown issued this week could contain clues linking Russia to the baffling in-flight vanishing of MH370.

The report cited by Wise was produced by the British-based online investigative group Bellingcat, which uses evidence from social media and other online postings in an attempt to crack international mysteries. The group and its founder, Eliot Higgins, gained worldwide attention in 2012 when they discovered evidence indicating that the government of Syria had deployed chemical weapons against its own citizens.

The new Bellingcat report focuses on the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014. Using extensive evidence gathered from publicly available online sources, including the social media postings of Russian military servicemen, to trace the shootdown to a Buk missile launcher operated by the Russian Army’s 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade, second batallion.

The report concludes that the unit’s apparent involvement in the shootdown could have only have come about with the knowledge and approval of the highest levels of the Russian military, including President Vladimir Putin himself.

The full Bellingcat report can be accessed online at this link.

The report redacts the names of Russian soldiers who may have been involved in the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 shootdown, and pixelates their faces in photographs taken from social media. But Bellingcat has trasmitted a non-redacted version of the report to Dutch authorities in charge of the official MH17 investigation.

More details on the new report can be learned in the following video, from the Kiev-based English-language satellite news channel Ukraine Today.

Jeff Wise reported on the Bellingcat findings Wednesday both on his own blog, and in an article published in New York Magazine.

Though the report offers no clue as to why Vladimir Putin may have wanted to shoot down the Malaysia Airlines plane, Wise says that whatever Putin was thinking, the Bellingcat report establishes that at least in his own mind, Putin had “sufficient motive” to allow the atrocity that killed all 298 people on board Flight MH17 to take place.

Wise last year gained worldwide media attention of his own when he published his theory that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 had disappeared as the result of a high-tech hijacking that involved a “spoof,” or faking of satellite data that has led searchers to believe the plane crashed in a remote region of the Indian Ocean now known as the “Seventh Arc”

But last week, the official Australian search team admitted that because they had uncovered no trace of the plane in the Seventh Arc after nearly 18 months of combing the ocean floor, that someone may have indeed commandeered the plane and flown it elsewhere.

According to Wise, who last year proposed the theory that Vladimir Putin was ultimately behind the MH370 disappearance — which claimed 239 lives — the searchers’ admission combined with the new Bellingcat report grants new credence to his notion that the Russian leader was behind both disasters.

“The relevance of this (Bellingcat) story to MH370 should be clear. Within four months, two Malaysian Airlines 777s were taken out of the sky under suspicious circumstances,” Wise wrote.

“If a spoof hijacking was perpetrated on MH370 then whoever carried it out possessed an extremely high level of technical sophistication. So high, in fact, that the attack must not only have been state sponsored, but sponsored by a state with cutting-edge technology in aircraft systems and satellite communications,” he added.

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Very few governments fit that description, Russia being one of them. And for Wise, the Russian involvement in the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 shootdown as detailed in the Bellingcat report is just too much of a coincidence to be ignored.

“If we suppose that MH370 was hijacked by someone other than the Russians, then that would mean that two Malaysian Airlines 777s—of which only 15 existed out of a worldwide commercial aircraft fleet of perhaps 18,000—happened to be targeted within the span of four months by two different major powers,” Wise wrote. “Talk about bad luck!”

Read The Inquisitr accounts of the links between Vladimir Putin and the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 mystery, as proposed by Wise, in the links contained in the above “Related Stories” box.

[Featured Photo By Sean Gallup/Getty Images]