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Latest on #MH370 cover-up? - 

Via the Courier Mail: https://www.couriermail.com.au/.../opini...up-over-wh...

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Opinion: Has there been a cover up over what happened to MH370? The families deserve answers

PLANE missing. Malaysian Airlines flight from KL to China. Australians on board. It was a simple and typically succinct email from my chief of staff, Matthew Connors, and it came at 9.46am, Saturday, March 8, 2014.

When a big story happens in a newsroom, a sense of organised chaos emerges, as reporters and photographers are assigned to their stories. In those first, frenetic hours, as we learned more by the minute, it became increasingly clear that this was not a typical airline crash.

As the day wore on, the overwhelming question kept recurring – where is this plane? It had literally vanished. How could a plane with 239 people on board just disappear from the face of the earth?

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The disappearance of MH370 is now the greatest mystery in aviation history, costing six Australians their lives, including Brisbane couples Rodney Burrows, 59 and his wife Mary, 54, and Robert Lawton, 58, and his wife Catherine, 54.

As the editor of The Sunday Mail on that fateful day, it was important that, as a newspaper, we not only gave readers the facts as we knew them, but treated the story with sensitivity and responsibility, for the sake of the victims’ families. To this day, the families of the Brisbane victims have only spoken to The Sunday Mail.

COVER UP

What we now know is that while there are several credible theories – including pilot mass murder-suicide, hijack or an explosion – there are serious questions as to whether Australia’s aviation regulator is treating the victims’ families with the respect and dignity they deserve.

In his compelling book, The Hunt for MH370, The Australian’s Ean Higgins makes it clear that the Australian Transport Safety Bureau is not telling us everything it knows.

This lack of transparency is extraordinary. What have they got to hide? The ATSB has been remarkably vague, obfuscating at every turn on this investigation.

Higgins also raises questions about the decision-making by the ATSB on where to focus the search for the aircraft in the southern Indian Ocean.

Higgins says: “In my efforts to get to the truth … the ATSB and the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre have engaged in some repressive media practices not usually consistent with public sector agencies in a democracy.

“They tried to have me taken off the story for persisting with questions they didn’t want to answer, an attempt the editors rejected.”

As it became more desperate to suppress The Australian’s reportage of criticism of its search finding, the ATSB hired a top law firm to issue warnings to the editors to “refrain’’ from its style of coverage – warnings the editors tossed aside and exposed’’.

WHAT DID HAPPEN?

As for what happened, Higgins says aviation experts believe the most likely scenario is that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, hijacked his own aircraft as part of a cunning act of mass murder-suicide.

There are other well-credentialed theories that it was a hijacking gone wrong, a fire on board caused by lithium batteries, accidental depressurisation, and a theory that North Korea hacked into the control systems and caused the crash. Even aliens have been put into the mix.

Whatever the scenario, the Australian Government must be much more proactive and open with any ongoing findings or search efforts.

The key issue here is that the national aviation regulator knows more than what it is letting on, and that’s not acceptable in a democracy like Australia where truth and accountability are fundamental to our way of life.

Five years on, the families of those who perished on MH370 deserve the truth. The cover up must end.

MTF...P2