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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why an entity with "state level resources" would need to go through this elaborate procedure to acquire a jet (which they presumably want to use for nefarious purposes).

1) What nefarious purpose could they possibly use it for? e.g. let's say they want to turn it into a flying bomb - do they really think the rest of the world won't figure out where it came from / who did it, simply because they're using a stolen plane?

2) Why go through all this trouble with a mission that could go catastrophically wrong, when you could just buy it through your regular black-budget process?

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The theory has a lot of holes, but in the absence of the plane and much other hard evidence, it becomes really attractive to believe in it. What were the Russians doing in Malaysia? In fact Russians make up an increasing number of tourists in south east asia. I ran into many when I was in Phuket a couple of years back.

Maybe it was some passengers/cargo they were interested in. </tinfoil>

Surely it would be easier to kidnap a passenger at their hotel, or to hijack their taxi, then to steal an entire airplane, take control of hundreds of passengers, make it disappear from radar, spoof the location, fly it across national borders, land it in Kazakhstan, and hide it underground.

It's completely absurd. If the president of the United States was on that flight, I'd give it more credibility. However, which passenger on that flight was so valuable, and surrounded by so much security, that hijacking the flight made sense?

The same goes for cargo, it must be easier to make friends in the right places, or pay people off to have that cargo "misplaced".

Oh, I'm with you, it's completely absurd.

Perhaps they were on holiday?

> In fact Russians make up an increasing number of tourists in south east asia

True, but not in Malaysia. It is a muslim country with high alcohol tax which could be two reasons that Russians, like many other Westerners, holiday in Thailand and not Malaysia.

If Russia did it (and I'm not saying there is a shred of evidence that they did) the motive would have been to distract the western media from Ukraine. It's interesting to me that there is a chunk of the infowars crowd that seized on this theory and IIRC this exact air strip before this guy came along and he will probably get some play in those circles.

I think a clue might be where he stated that the CNN checks stopped rolling in. I could only assume to get them back he needs to have more news and a captive audience.

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