By Walid Shoebat

So what does a civilian jetliner loaded with innocent passengers  landing in the ocean have anything to do with Islamic martyrdom?

Well, a lot. I will tell you in a few seconds (or minutes), it all depends on how fast you want to read.

But first some background. When flight MH370 disappeared, Shoebat.com back on December 30, 2014 reported: “A former Boeing 777 pilot has claimed missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 could have only veered off course due to sabotage. “Is it a coincidence that this track managed to avoid Indonesian, Thai and then Indian military radar?” the Boeing 777 pilot said. He also stipulates for air traffic control to lose secondary radar contact with MH370 someone would have had to interfere with the systems.” And as far back as March 14, 2014, Shoebat.com reported: “Sources told Reuters that the flight path of an unidentified aircraft, which investigators believe was MH370, followed a route with specific navigational waypoints, suggesting someone with aviation training was at the helm.”

But of course, our reporting might be ruled out as “conspiracy theory”?

Not any longer. Especially that our conclusion shows the captain was trying to avoid radar and recently, on April 16th, 2015, over a year later, the BBC reported under the title: “Flight MH370: Could it have been suicide?”

Excuse me? Was the BBC only catching up to a conspiracy theory? The report the BBC provided discusses Captain Simon Hardy’s analysis of flight MH370:

He’s convinced about something that no pilot, no passenger, nobody in fact wants to think is possible – that the captain of the flight, Zaharie Shah, deliberately hid the plane from radar and flew it thousands of miles off course, before it came down in the ocean. He says the clues are in the route it took after it vanished from air traffic control. It turned back on itself and flew along the border of Malaysia and Thailand. “It flew in and out of the countries eight times,” he says. “This is probably very accurate flying rather than just a coincidence. As both air traffic controllers in both those countries would probably assume that the aircraft was in the other country’s jurisdiction and not pay it any attention … “We know what happened,” David Learmount, safety editor at Flight Global, has said of MH370. “There’s only one thing it can be – a deliberate act by someone on board, probably the captain.”

And this is not only the views of Hardy and Learmount, this view gains momentum, especially that the Australian investigators describe Hardy’s theory as “credible”.

We have been saying this way before all these researchers. This is no “conspiracy theory” but is currently the most plausible scenario. Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah has been identified by Malaysian police as the prime suspect.

Now here is the kicker. Hardy spent six months analysing the known MH370 data and concluded that the plane was:

“intentionally landed on the Indian Ocean and sank intact just 20 nautical miles (37km) outside the current search area.”

“landed” and “sank intact” instead of crashing, is perhaps a clue, perhaps not to an aviation expert, but an expert on the rules of Islamic martyrdom. First of all, the flaperon that was found does not rule out Hardy’s theory and in fact supports it. This is one piece that will roughly hit the water and come loose. Landing on water is no soft landing.

But what Hardy needs to be aware of is that in Islam, it is not only the warrior in battle who is considered “martyr”. If Hardy’s theory proves true, Shah was designing a meticulous plan, not just on how he weaved through all the detection, but he must have meticulously considered his fate: drowning. In Islam, most Muslims know (which most westerners are unaware of), when a Muslim dies by drowning, he is automatically considered a “martyr” and is perhaps why Shah “landed” instead of crashing, since death due to an impact spoils the recipe and he might end up in hell. Under the classification of martyrdom in Islam, it states:

“… he who dies of a stomach disease is a martyr; and he who is drowned is a martyr.” [Sahih Muslim].

Shah in a mosque

What is conclusive, is that Captain Shah, was an activist fighting for the release of his Islamist Malaysian opposition politician Anwar Ibrahim, who has recently been jailed on sex charges that his supporters (including Shah) say are trumped-up. Here Ibrahim he can be seen with the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi:

This would make Shah an Islamist. The suicide theory, the most plausible one so far, is perhaps the first thing to consider when including the fact that the pilot was Muslim. And while such act is not considered terrorism by the West, they better start adjusting their policies. Although Shah’s drowning was intentional, which many will object as “suicide” which Islam prohibits, this is incorrect.

One discussion amongst Islamists is the story of the suicide of 700 Muslims on a ship which they deliberetly sank and committed mass suicide. Why?Instead of surrendering the ship to Richard The Lionheart, they chose to poke holes in it and drown with it. They were considered “martyrs”. All one has to do is read the works of the famed terrorist, Anwar Al-Awlaki’s work who tells the story:

“If the intentions of the Muslim are good and for the sake of Allah then he [the one who drowns] is a shaheed [martyr] whether he died by the enemy or by his own hands. It is the intention that counts … Salahudeen counted the [700] casualties as martyrs in the path of Allah.”

Hiring Muslim pilots can be hazardous to the health of the airline industry. Call it racism or whatever, anyone who does not like such realities can bang their head on a wall or choose to drown in the sea of Gaza after they convert to Islam.

But Islamic sanctioned suicide comes in different flavors. Regarding the other flight, QZ8501, it was different in that it crashed. On January 20th, 2015, the BBC reported that:

The AirAsia flight that crashed in the Java Sea, killing 162 people, climbed too fast before stalling, Indonesia’s transport minister has said. Ignasius Jonan told a parliamentary hearing in Jakarta that flight QZ8501 had ascended at a speed of 6,000ft (1,828m) per minute. He said it was not normal for a passenger jet to climb so fast. Mr Jonan told the hearing that radar data from the moments before the plane was lost revealed its speed of ascent. “It is not normal to climb like that. It’s very rare for commercial planes, which normally climb just 1,000 to 2,000 feet per minute,” he said. “It can only be done by a fighter jet.”

While the media speaks of the differences between both flights (and there are differences), so far we have even more serious similarities. The chances of both flights from the same area, both flights had Muslim pilots, both flights have a high possibility of turning off transponders, both flights veering off course and both flights had no trace and both flights making no distress signals, makes the probabilities of an accident less likely and the probabilities of foul play likely. For unknown reasons to this day, this particular Boeing 777 on flight MH370 veered off its original flight path and did not send any distress signal, similar to flight QZ8501.

Call me an Islamophobe, but when I research the pilot from the missing flight QZ8501 Captain Iriyanto (I access the local news in Indonesian, not the news in English), there I find out that the pilot of the missing flight QZ8501 and like the pilot on the other missing flight MH370 are both devout Muslims. When I see all this, I get somewhat paranoid. Translating from Indonesian I find the following:

“Iriyanto was also active in the community as a board member and chairman of the mosque at his residence in Pondok Jati Block BC 12 Village Pagerwojo, Buduran, Sidoarjo.”

“In addition to serving as Chairman of RT 39, Iriyanto also served as a board leader of Masjid Nurul Yaqin, which is located in the housing complex.”

“He was also diligent in worship. When everyone was at home, he would certainly be seen praying in congregation in the mosque”.

But perhaps the only way to gain credibility is to find what we report is also carried by “credible” journalists. Western Journalism reported:

According to an exclusive report by Walid Shoebat, the lead pilots aboard both Malaysia Airlines flight 370 and AirAsia flight QZ8501 shared one frightening trait: a deep devotion to Islam. Shoebat, a self-professed former Islamic terrorist who converted to Christianity and has since spoken out against the violence associated with his former faith, pointed out that the captain of the flight that disappeared over the Java Sea this past weekend had dark and deadly extremist ties.

His report relied in part on Indonesian news sources, which described Captain Iriyanto as a devout Muslim.

English translations of the foreign reports, Shoebat wrote, indicate the pilot was “active in the community as a board member and chairman of the mosque at his residence” and “also served as a board leader of Masjid Nurul Yaqin, which is located in the housing complex.”

Not only was he a faithful follower of Islam, reports also indicate he spent nearly a decade as an airman for the Indonesian military. The jets he flew were used in missions until the end of the 20th century and were reportedly responsible for the annihilation of about one-third of East Timor’s predominantly Christian population.

Shoebat wrote that both the pilot and co-pilot of flight MH370 were also devout Muslims. He also pointed out that both flights lost radar contact under suspicious circumstances.

While wreckage from the latest jet has been found, speculation still surrounds the disappearance of MH370, with some suggesting it landed safely to await use in a future terrorist operation.

Though his report affirms there is no concrete evidence that the pilots’ respective Islamic faith played any role in the disappearance of these jets, Shoebat concludes that such a scenario is “not far-fetched,” adding that “being paranoid at times is better than being skeptic.”

We are not conspiracy theorists. The real conspiracy theorists who reckon the CIA hijacked it to Diego Garcia – or anywhere else – are going to have to search their imaginations for an alternative explanation (of course they will create a conspiracy where that flaperon came from). As when it comes to QZ8501, while we still await a transcript from the Black Box, the cries of “Allahu Akbar” from the cockpit was confirmed, but they ruled out terrorism, of course, since by western definition, Islamic terrorism is only considered “terrorism” when Muslims are ‘martyred’ for a political cause and this does not include “personal martyrdom” (see Chatanooga), which the West in collective-denial lemming behavior categorize such actions as suicide. And since this is a “blog” and not the BBC, everything we say here is of course all “conspiracy theory”.

However, I still think that being somewhat “paranoid” is a good thing.