Aussies foil Islamic terrorist plot to bring down an airliner

Walt takes off his hat -- the one with the corks dangling from the rim -- to the Australian rozzers (= police) and government for their candour in saying, right off the bat, that they believe "Islamic-inspired terrorism" is behind the plot to bring down an airplane, foiled by the arrest of four men in raids on Sydney homes this weekend.

Aussie Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that security has been increased at Sydney Airport since Thursday because of the plot. "I can report last night that there has been a major joint counterterrorism operation to disrupt a terrorist plot to bring down an airplane," he told reporters. "The operation is continuing."

Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin said he didn't yet have a lot of detail on the specifics of the attack, the location and timing. He could say only that "in recent days, law enforcement has been become aware of information that suggested some people in Sydney were planning to commit a terrorist attack using an improvised device." But, when asked if ISIS was behind the plot, Mr Colvin was politically incorrect enough to say, "We believe it's Islamic-inspired terrorism."

AP quoted Greg Barton, a "security expert" with Deakin University in Melbourne, as saying that the first plot to target aircraft in Australia, which is the highest aspiration of many extremists, was a "pretty big threshold moment." He went on to say that the plotters were apparently making a peroxide-based explosive device rather than using nitrate-based chemicals that can be detected by airport security swab tests.

Islamic fanatic Salman Abedi used a peroxide-based explosive, triacetone triperoxide, better known as TATP, to kill 22 concert-goers in Manchester, UK, just over two months ago. According to Prof. Barton, "TATP is called 'Mother of Satan' because it often kills the bomb maker because it's very unstable as it's mixed. But if it's mixed well, it can be very potent and a small amount can be enough to bring an aircraft down if it's done very, very expertly."

The plan most likely was to take the explosive on board in carry-on luggage unless there was a baggage handler involved who could ensure that a stowed bomb exploded near the fuselage where it would be most damaging. This may be the method used to cause the crash of Egyptian Airlines flight MS804 in May of 2016. French investigators called it an accident, but Walt suggests taking their findings cum grano salis. See "MS804: Where there's smoke there's fire", WWW 21/5/16.

Names of the four Mohammeds ["men", shurely! Ed.] arrested (but not yet charged) have yet to be released. Walt presumes they are, at this very moment, "helping police with their investigations". May I suggest that before the coppers put the rubber hoses away, they ask the detainees what they know about MS804, and, while they're at it, MH370. Sooner or later, the pieces of the Islamic jigsaw puzzle must fit together!

Latest on MS804: Explosion theory looks more likely

Early on Thursday, this Egyptair Airbus A320-232, registration number SU-GCC, was en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people aboard when it vanished from radar. The plane was last "seen" by Greek radar. The Greek defence minister said the plane turned 90 degrees, then 360 degrees, before plummeting into the Mediterranean sea.

Yesterday, an Egyptian aviation official contradicted the Greek report. Ehab Azmy, who is head of Egypt's state-run provider of air navigation services, told AP that the plane had been flying at its normal height of 37,000 feet before dropping off the radar. It was not observed, he said, to swerve and change direction before it disappeared. The reason for the discrepancy between the Greek and the Egyptian aviation official's accounts of the crash is not clear, and neither Egyptair nor the Egyptian Ministry of Civil Aviation have commented on the final movements of the aircraft.

Greek aviation officials had said air traffic controllers spoke to the pilot when he entered Greek airspace and everything appeared normal. They tried to contact him again at 02:27 Cairo time, as the plane was set to enter Egyptian airspace, but "despite repeated calls, the aircraft did not respond." Last week, the Aviation Herald reported that smoke detectors went off in the plane's toilet and electrical systems three minutes before it disappeared.

As reported here yesterday, a number of messages were transmitted by the plane's ACARS system, which sends short transmissions from the aircraft to receivers on the ground, before it disappeared. Ed. has sourced the actual texts. Time stamps are in "Zulu time", that is GMT, two hours behind Cairo time.

00:26Z 3044 ANTI ICE R WINDOW
00:26Z 561200 R SLIDING WINDOW SENSOR
00:26Z 2600 SMOKE LAVATORY SMOKE
00:27Z 2600 AVIONICS SMOKE
00:28Z 561100 R FIXED WINDOW SENSOR
00:29Z 2200 AUTO FLT FCU 2 FAULT
00:29Z 2700 F/CTL SEC 3 FAULT

I wrote yesterday of the increasing speculation that the ACARS signals indicated that a bomb or incendiary device had exploded, affecting the right side of the aircraft. This morning we have an initial assessment from an Egyptian forensics official that human remains retrieved from the crash site suggest that there was an explosion on board the plane, although no traces of explosives have been detected.

The official based his assessment on the small size of body parts so far recovered from the Mediterranean Sea, where MS804 crashed. 23 bags of body parts have been collected since Sunday. "The size of the remains points towards an explosion," the official said. "The biggest part was the size of a palm."

However, another senior forensics official said only a tiny number of remains had arrived so far, and it was too early to specify whether there had been an explosion aboard. Investigators rely on debris, bags and clothes as well as chemical analysis to detect the imprints of an explosion, according to people involved in two previous probes where deliberate blasts were involved.

Supposing the cause of the crash really was an explosion. Who do you think might be responsible? Click here to read "MS804: 'We will bring this plane down'", WWW 23/5/16.

MS804: "We will bring this plane down" - NY Times report

The lamestream media are hedging on initial speculation that Thursday's crash of Egyptair MS804 into the Mediterranean Sea was caused by bomb planted by Islamic terrorists. They point to the paucity of scorch marks and other signs of fire on fragments of debris found so far, as well as the erratic twists and turns of the aircraft moments before it dropped off the radar screens. This morning, however, the mojo wire brings two new pieces of information which, taken together, point the finger of suspicion squarely at followers of Mohammed.

First we have a report from the New York Times that "EgyptAir was aware of threats to security, including one scribbled on plane". Two years ago, vandals daubed the Airbus with a graffito reading: "We will bring this plane down".

The Times, always politically corrected, says those words weren't a jihadist threat, but a protest against Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Egyptian president who seized power in a coup. Egyptair didn't see it quite that way, and fired a number of staff with alleged Muslim Brotherhood sympathies in 2013 as part of a general purge of suspected Islamists after the military takeover.

Fast forward to November of 2015. French police said that in the weeks following the Paris attacks, graffiti such as “Allahu Akbar” were found daubed on EasyJet and Vueling planes at the Paris and Lyon airports. The discoveries raised fears that a bomb could be planted on a plane at an airport in France, but EasyJet and the French authorities insisted at the time there was nothing to worry about. Although they acknowledged that such graffiti had been found on a number of planes in the months before the terror strikes, Inspector Clouseau played down any link with the attacks.

Over to London, now, whewre The Telegraph quotes an unnamed commercial pilot with a major European airline that parts of MS804's data log suggested that windows in the right side of the cockpit were blown out by an explosion inside the aircraft. The pilot, who flies an A-330 (similar to the downed A-320) told the paper, "It looks like the right front and side window were blown out, most probably from inside out."

The pilot suggested the smoke detectors may have been set off not by a fire but by fog which filled the cabin as it lost air pressure in the moments after the explosion. The data he referred to were taken from the plane's ACARS system, which sends short transmissions from the aircraft to receivers on the ground.

Three different warnings showed there were faults in the windows next to the co-pilot, suggesting they could have been blasted outwards by an onboard bomb. That does not mean the explosion came from the cockpit, but indicates the right side of the plane was more badly damaged than the left. Until investigators find the plane's black boxes, the ACARS data are the only clues as to what was happening aboard MS804 in the last minutes of the fateful flight. Walt will update the story as more information becomes available.

MS804: Where there's smoke, there's fire

We're starting to get a look at some of the debris that has been recovered from the Mediterranean Sea, about 250 miles north of Alexandria, Egypt. (We're not talking about the lifejackets recovered just after the disappearance of Egyptair MS804 near the Greek island of Crete.) Pictures circulating on the internet show some rags of clothing and a life vest, which do not appear to be scorched or burned. The absence of burn marks suggests that the Airbus 320 broke up either before or when it hit the water. But there's little more to go on, as only a few pieces of debris have so far been recovered.

Meanwhile, Egyptian officials are investigating reports that smoke detectors went off shortly before the plane crashed. And French say there were indications of a fire on board. Sebastien Barthe, a spokesthingy for the French air accident investigation service, says messages sent by the plane's automatic detection system suggest smoke was detected in multiple places on board the aircraft before it went down. Messages of that type usually indicate the start of a fire, he said, but anything beyond that is "pure conjecture" at this point.

The respected industry website The Aviation Herald has published automatic alerts transmitted by the A-320. In short succession, they indicate the opening of a cockpit window, smoke in a lavatory and smoke underneath the flight deck in the electronics bay. Further messages also suggest problems with the flight controls computer.

"Over a period of three minutes, the aircraft system shut down," said the editor of Aviation Security International."That's starting to indicate that it probably wasn't a hijacking. There probably wasn't a struggle in the cockpit. It's more likely a fire on board," he said. "Now, whether that was a technical fire, a short circuit, or whether it was because a bomb went off on board, we don't know."

So it's still much too soon to say what happened. It could be something as simple as some simpleton having a smoke in the lavatory and causing a fire. Or it could be a terrorist -- not likely a Christian or a Jew -- setting fire to his shoes or underpants. Stay tuned.

UPDATED: MS804, another MH370?

This is developing news, so I'll update this post tonight or tomorrow, but want to put out a first thought.

AP reports that an EgyptAir Airbus 320, operating flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo with 66 pax and crew on board, crashed in the Mediterranean early this morning. French President François Hollande told the mdia, "Unfortunately the information we have...confirms to us that the plane came down and is lost. No hypothesis can be ruled out, nor can any be favoured over another."

Egypt's Civil Aviation Minister, Sherif Fathy, takes a different position. While not yet confirming that the plane crashed, he said that the possibility of a terror attack as the cause of the plane's disappearance from the radar screens is "stronger" than a technical failure.

Here's what we know so far. Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos said the plane was about 10 to 15 miles inside Egyptian airspaqce when it made two abrupt turns and suddenly lost altitude before disappearing from radar. "It turned 90 degrees left and then a 360-degree turn toward the right, dropping from 38,000 to 15,000 feet and then it was lost at about 10,000 feet."

Haven't we seen this movie before, just over two years ago? Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 was heading northeast towards Beijing when it abruptly made a 90-degree turn to the west-northwest, then (according to the searchers' hypothesis), made a further turn towards the southwest and disappeared into the Indian Ocean somewhere off the west coast of Australia.

Regular readers of WWW will know that Walt does not agree with the theory that MH370, whether controlled or uncontrolled, slowly flew into the sea. But supposing the "experts" are correct, that's what seems to have happened to MS804. The search for wreckage is under way. Stay tuned.

UPDATED at 1225. A couple of lifejackets and some other debris has been found off the coast of the Greek island of Crete. Given that Crete is some distance north of the last known location of MS804, Walt thinks it's more likely this junk came from boats carrying "refugees". More later.