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19 March 2024

Diego Garcia and MH370 conspiracy of a 'lost' island in middle of it all

Diego Garcia (Photo wikimedia commons)

Published
By Staff with Agencies

With the batteries on the black boxes of missing Malaysia Airline flight MH370 set to run down, news that a signal detected by a Chinese ship searching the Indian Ocean for flight is "consistent" with the type emitted from the aircraft black box, is being met with hope, bitter relief and skepticism.

Hope for the many nations, not least Malaysia, seeking an answer as to what happened to the ill-fated airline.

Bitter relief for the families of the passengers on board as they can finally know and accept the fate of what has happened to their loved ones.

And skepticism, by the conspiracy theorists – who find it all to convenient that a ‘ping’ is located one day before the black-box ‘deadline’.

While the Malaysian authorities and the Australians, in charge of the search, have vowed to remain committed to finding the answers, however long that may take, an interesting report has emerged on news website asiaone.com

It involved a small atoll in the Indian Ocean that is a military island, controlled and operated by the US and the UK.

According to the report, the conspiracy theory now gaining traction on the internet comes from freelance journalist Jim Stone and concerns the atoll of Diego Garcia.

According to Stone’s theory, an American passenger on board MH370, named as Philip Wood, sent out an image and voice activated text, along with GPS coordinates that trace to a location a few kilometres away from Diego Garcia.

The text claimed that Wood was being held hostage by unknown military personnel.

This report has now sparked speculation that MH370 had landed on this US military base. Even more interestingly, Diego Garcia is reported to also act as an emergency landing site for commercial aircraft that are cleared to fly the long, landless distance over the Indian Ocean.

Diego Garcia is a tiny atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

The AsiaOne report quotes the official British government site, gov.uk, as stating that the British Indian Ocean Territory is administered from London and there is no British diplomatic or consular representation on Diego Garcia and that it is not a tourist destination.

Access is restricted and a permit is required in advance of travel.

According to a Wikipedia entry on the atoll, the United States Navy operates Naval Support Facility (NSF) Diego Garcia, a large naval ship and submarine support base, military air base, communications and space-tracking facility, and an anchorage for pre-positioned military supplies for regional operations aboard Military Sealift Command ships in the lagoon.

For complete coverage of Search for Missing Malaysia Airline MH370 click here