Expert Believes Missing Malaysian Airlines Flight Being Held For Ransom

Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is no closer to being found as the disappearance of the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people nears its two-week mark.

Pilot suicide, terrorism and hijacking are some possibilities that are being theorized to the plane as the search area expanded to 7 million square miles. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said last week that “there are a number of possible scenarios that are being investigated as to what happened to the flight.”

Rick Mathews, of the National Center for Security & Preparedness at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy of SUNY Albany, tells CBSDC that there is another theory that should be put into play: the missing flight is being held for ransom by a group of individuals, maybe including people from the flight crew.

“You want to most likely hide the plane so that it will not be seen and get these people away from there. You want a place to prove life, confirm the fact that they are alive without giving away their location,” Mathews told CBSDC, adding that this was an “internal hijacking” that might have been perpetrated by one or more members of the crew.

Mathews feels the hijackers will go public “anytime now” because the weight of the world and governments will be on them.

“If they are ransoming, they want to get away with this,” Mathews explained. “They are not doing this as a suicidal play, they want to make use of this. They want to make sure they have a place for themselves.”

Mathews believes whoever took the plane had an air strip prepared for landing and camouflage as to not be caught by satellites.

“It takes a great deal of coordination to hide a plane,” he said.

Mathews said a part of him thought it could’ve been terrorism initially, but it’s not indicative that a terrorist group carried this out because they would’ve exploited the situation by now.

Mathews also believes that if the plane did crash into the ocean, it would have shown up on imagery, helping to further suggest that the missing flight landed somewhere.

“The individuals who hijacked this plane had to have knowledge of how to disable certain things to make the plane appear to be normal and fly it relatively undetected,” Mathews noted. “Nobody in real time noticed that this was an issue here.”

Read more at CBS WASHINGTON.

{Matzav.com Newscenter}