Disappearance of Flight M370 no Longer a Mystery

Pilot of  Flight 370 Wearing Opposition Party T-Shirt

I hope that the families of the missing passengers on Malaysian airlines flight 370  find closure this week. The Australian government may have spotted debris from the airliner in the Southern Indian ocean.  Search vessels are converging on that spot, but it might take days to find and identify the wreckage. Whether or not this latest effort proves definitive, this mystery is finally resolving itself, at least in my mind.

  The 53 year old senior pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah,  was a fervent supporter of Malaysian opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim. In fact, the two men were distantly related in-laws and had met on several occasions at political events.  On the morning of the day of the fateful flight, the pilot storned out of a Malaysian court room enraged by a Court of Appeals decision sentencing the opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, to five years in prison for engaging in homosexual acts. In the Malaysian penal code, homosexual sex, even if consensual, was  punishable by up to twenty years in prison. Both the accused opposition leader and his wife claimed that the charges were fabricated, politically motivated attempts to discredit him. 

That evening pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah boarded flight 370 bent on humiliating Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. And he knew precisely how to do it.   

This pilot's act of vengeance has just ended any future aspirations of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. The man may be many times more democratically-minded, incorruptible and politically astute than the present Prime Minister.  But who would ever cast a ballot for a leader who commanded such fanatical loyalty from his supporters that one of them might murder 239 men, women and children, 238 of whom were innocent of any crime whatsoever?