> Van Sabben passed away in the United Arab Emirates two weeks after the Stuxnet attack as a result of a motorcycle accident.
Well, that’s not suspicious at all. Any of the parties involved could conceivably benefit from his accident.
Well, that’s not suspicious at all. Any of the parties involved could conceivably benefit from his accident.
He was a well known engineer that had worked in Dubai for 12 years in the transport industry and had an Iranian wife. He was well known as an engineer at the forefront of the rapid development of major projects in the Gulf region.
A regional paper even published his obituary in 2009:
https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/engineer-who-helped-buil...
Excerpt:
Erik van Sabben, a Dubai-based engineer whose expertise in the heavy lifting and transport industry placed him at the forefront of the rapid development in the Gulf over the past decade, has died. A keen motorcycle rider, he was killed in an accident near Dhaid on Jan 16, just two weeks short of his 37th birthday. Born in Vlissingen, The Netherlands, Mr van Sabben had lived in the Gulf on and off for 12 years. While an undergraduate, he worked as a trainee for Mammoet Gulf in Dubai, a specialist heavy lifting company, which he joined after graduating. He spent the next decade in Dubai, and briefly, Abu Dhabi.
https://english.aawsat.com/features/4778291-stuxnet-mystery-...
These stories are all "according to intelligence sources", they can really anonymously brief out anything that serves their needs.
All this requires is to understand who died shortly after Stuxnet who could have feasibly been involved.
It was his family who said that he started panicking, so he was probably involved.
It seems much more likely that he actually did die in a random motorcycle accident (not uncommon), or he was entirely uninvolved and a dead man was chosen to pin blame on in order to hide the real method(or, to make Iranians stop trusting foreign contractors, making them do everything in-house with higher costs and worse quality).
If he panicked after the Stuxnet attack, as his family is reported to have said, then it's likely he has behaving erratically and was fearful for his life.
That could easily translate to circumstances where he rides a motorcycle in a particularly dangerous manner - e.g. fleeing from someone he thought was Iranian/Dutch/US/Israeli intelligence (even if they weren't).
Also, reasonable chance this entire story is fabricated and this was done a different way.
The point of killing someone over some wrong they did you is publicizing it after the fact. If you don't take credit for it, it doesn't have any deterrent power.
Or alternately, he did it and then tried to back out of the deal. Now arranging an apparently accidental death then became the best way to keep security intact.
The one theory that makes no sense is that they intended his death from the beginning.
Like the JFK assassination theories that involve killing off an additional dozens of people. You can't cover up one murder by involving an extra 1000 people.
- Foreigner
- Engineer
- Married to Iranian
- Access to plant (Alleged)
- Died from non-natural causes within 2 weeks at age 36
The various deaths associated with Putin are a counter example here. Russia denies involvement but the method usually makes it pretty obvious. Rare poison, unlikely situation etc.
The asset in this case wasn't known publicly and the method of death makes people assume it was simply an accident. Unless they did some private announcement, no one was deterred. If it was Iran and they wanted to send a message, they would probably have to out the asset publicly and/or make it clear that it was an assassination. e.g. a bomb would send a clear signal that it was more likely to be a nation state assassination and not some accident or a random robbery/act of violence.
It’s a pretty strong signal to others that there are consequences.
"We successfully attacked the nuclear facility!"
"Oh Van, by the way what name did you sign in the log book?"
"...Oh no"
I imagine there are a non-zero amount of readers (but not commenters) who find these stories comments extremely funny.
From the report in Dutch, they raise the point he may not have even known the magnitude of what he was doing. Until it already had been done and he realized what happened.
Even AIVD/MIVD may have not known…or so they say.
But we will probably never know.
Actually his name is Erik, van Sabben is his last name. Perhaps that's how he got away with it.
They were all older gents, but it’s not outside the realm of plausibility that “Van” could be what van Sabben was called. :)
I’m not clear on the timeline. As I understand it, the hack went on for ages before it went malignant and started damaging stuff. Is it 2 weeks from being deployed, or 2 weeks from wrecking equipment?
Do you think he got the villa next to Epstein or Kobe?
It's much easier for a country to retire an engineer with a fat paycheck than to create an incredible amount of distrust killing him.
An assassination only makes sense if somehow he threatened to tell everything to the iranian goverment.
Either one can cause what looks like a typical accident.
Plane crashes have a pretty high death rate too, but plane crashs are rare.
What is the probability of having a motorcycle accident in Saudi Arabia.
The odds of dying in a traffic accident in that country are considerably higher than in the United States, and much higher than in other developed countries (sorry USA, you suck at road safety, but not as much as the UAE does)[1].
While I don't have country-specific statistics to hand, the odds of dying riding a motorcycle are much, much higher than in a car. One estimate is that you are around 27 times more likely to die per distance driven/ridden [2].
Even so, in an absolute sense, the odds of dying on a typical motorcycle commute are low. My guess is that your odds of meeting foul play shortly after screwing with the Iranian nuclear program are likely higher than dying in a random traffic accident. But coincidences do occur.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
[2] https://www.autoinsurance.org/motorcycle-vs-car-accidents/
The US is right in the middle -- doing better than the Czech Republic and South Korea -- on the metric that matters on the page you linked, but really, more data is needed because the metric you want to look at is mostly missing from the table.
But to be serious, I meant it mostly that it's certainly one case that would warrant extra investigations. Even if it was a random accident, someone like the Iranians could have claimed that their super advanced spy hunting team got him.
This is not the number that really matters in this context.
Falling out of a 8 story window has an incredibly high injury/death rate. Yet those we often assume ARE the result of foul-play.
What we're really comparing here is the probability of a party either lying, or contributing (causing) the motor cycle accident. The lethality rates aren't super interesting in this case. The main difference between this and falling out of windows, is that window-falls are much more rare then motor cycle accidents.
Who is 'we'? Falls out of buildings are overwhelmingly due to accidents by tradespeople or suicide.
Most homicides by being pushed from a height occur in remote areas, not from buildings. Most windows on high buildings are limited in how far they open during normal operation for safety reasons. And most older buildings that lack these features have smaller windows with higher sills. Statistics aren't tracked to this level by most crime reports because it is so overwhelmingly rare for someone to be killed this way.
While homicidal defenestration makes for a good fictional story line, I don't think it is useful for murderers.
> Statistics aren't tracked to this level by most crime reports because it is so overwhelmingly rare for someone to be killed this way.
The real issue here is we aren't comparing the statistics of the "average joe". For random-person we can predict the reason for their fall was unlikely to be state-level foul play - in fact near zero chance of it.
The likely hood of state-level foul play is substantially higher for spies, rich oligarchs with unpopular opinions, journalists, etc. How much higher I have no idea.
---
Anyway my point was the lethality of the cause of death is really not what anyone is interested in. When spies, rich oligarchs with unpopular opinions, journalists, etc die shortly after they did something particularly provoking I don't think people care about the lethality of the incident as much as the cause.
However, it's also easy to fall into the fallacious trap of defining people solely by their profession. People who have sensitive jobs and also do other risky activities in their spare time incur those risks in addition to the risks they have due to their profession.
In fact, some successful people with enemies engage in more risky activities because they can afford to do so. Rich people dying in general aviation accidents is a pretty frequent pattern, for example.
Plenty of weirdly coincidental falls from windows:
> Ravil Maganov, September 1 2022, reportedly hospitalised for heart problems and depression, then "fell out of a window"
> Grigory Kochenov, December 7 2022, reportedly fell to his death from his balcony while officials from the Investigative Committee executed a search warrant for his apartment
> Dmitriy Zelenov, December 9 2022, reportedly felt ill and fell over a railing and hit his head, later died in hospital without regaining consciousness
> Pavel Antov, December 24 2022, fell out of window from Hotel Sai International
> Marina Yankina, February 16 2023, found dead after falling from a window on the 16th-floor of a high-rise building.
> Artyom Bartenev, June 8 2023, found dead after falling 12 stories from his apartment window.
> Kristina Baikova, June 23 2023, fell off her apartment at the 11th floor; circumstances of the incident have not yet been clarified.
USA and Israel think Iran have got a bit close to figuring out Stuxnet culprit, they put out a story and use a poor guy who can’t defend himself against the accusation of being involved, one who happened to have had a tragic accident with a motorbike and who so just happened to do some work in Iran. And boom, the death is suspicious so there must be truth to it all…
That is probably more believable (to me at least).
I don't see how punishing him further accomplishes anything.
source:Floridian
I swear, the latest generation of conspiracy theorists are really pathetic.