How could I forget this?
The Obscurer’s coverage of the Undabomber has been marked by one man. Here he is:
Peter Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House intelligence committee, said it was examining Mutallab’s links with the radical Yemeni imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has inspired a number of terrorists.Awlaki had contacts with Major Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who is accused of carrying out the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in November in which 13 people were murdered. According to government officials, Awlaki was also the spiritual adviser to two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, while he was an imam at a mosque in northern Virginia. The FBI investigated him in 1999 and 2000, believing him to be a possible procurement agent for Osama bin Laden.
In Toronto, a terror cell watched videos of Awlaki at a makeshift training camp where an attack was planned on the Canadian parliament and prime minister. “He’s a star attraction as a recruiter to young Americans and Canadians,” one former American intelligence official told the US media.
This month, in an interview with Al Jazeera, Awlaki expressed surprise that the US military had failed to uncover Hasan’s plan, to which he gave his backing. “My support to the operation was because the operation brother Nidal carried out was a courageous one, and I endeavoured to explain my position regarding what happened because many Islamic organisations and preachers in the west condemned the operation,” he said.
Awlaki left the US and moved to Yemen in 2002 where he established an English-language website that has thousands of followers around the world. In January 2009, he published an online essay, 44 Ways to Support Jihad, in which he asserts that all Muslims must participate in jihad, whether in person, by funding mujahideen or by fighting the west.
There’s something missing here…can you spot it?
Concerns about his influence in the UK have been expressed by experts on community cohesion. In August, the Observer reported anger that Awlaki was due to speak via a video link at Kensington town hall. The broadcast was dropped after the local council stepped in. He has also been invited to give talks via video link at several London universities. “Mutallab is the latest in a long list of terrorists [Awlaki] has inspired and encouraged,” said Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens of the Centre for Social Cohesion.
“The preacher has long been a highly respected figure within a number of British university Islamic societies because, unlike most other radical preachers, Awlaki speaks English as a first language, and being born and raised in America has given him a good understanding of western culture. This makes him very appealing to young western Muslims.”
Meleagrou-Hitchens called for British universities to increase their vigilance. “This incident should act as a wake-up call to university authorities,” he said. “It is crucial that they now accept the central role they must play in resisting extremists and preventing student groups from promoting hate preachers.”
Did you spot it? The Obscurer didn’t actually say that he had any connection with the pants bomber. They didn’t even quote Hoekstra saying so – and Hoekstra is a comedy rightwing buffoon anyway. They didn’t adduce any evidence of his connections with him in any way – just cut straight to Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens. Whose kid are you?
Oh, right. He’s “worked” for Standpoint, the Centre for Social Cohesion, Policy Exchange, and the Henry Jackson Society. I think he gets a free cup of coffee and 200 air miles if he can punch another content-free wanktank funded by the Tories’ neocon wing on his loyalty card.
PolEx’s Web site has an “Alumni” page, but mysteriously it bears no trace of him. Google, however, knows:
He has also worked at the Stanford University based think tank, the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace, and the Washington DC based think tank, Foundation for Defence of Democracies (FDD).He holds an MA in International Relations from Brunel University, and a BA in Classics from King’s College London.
Alexander researched for publications providing policy recommendations on creating a robust defence against the threat of terrorism in the UK and abroad.
FDD as well! Free cuppa for you! There is, of course, no suggestion of or link to any work on terrorism he ever did.
Today, he’s in the Obscurer again. Let’s roll the tape.
Recordings of Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida sympathiser who is believed to have inspired Abdulmutallab in Yemen, can be bought through British-based websites and bookshops. Three shops in London and Manchester were contacted by this newspaper last week. Staff said they could sell DVDs of the speeches by the cleric, who is banned from the UK.
As recently as last April, students at London’s City University Islamic Society’s annual dinner were invited to hear the words of al-Awlaki being broadcast live into Britain.
So why is he “believed” to have inspired pants boy? Where is the evidence? It’s not even the electioneering torture fan Hoekstra this time.
Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a research fellow for the think-tank the Centre for Social Cohesion,
For it is he.
said that al-Awlaki has become an increasingly influential figure. “For well over a year now, organisations such as ours have repeatedly warned about the dangerous influence of this man, with most of our warnings falling on deaf ears,” he said.
Call now and buy your anti-terrorist water ioniser – 20 per cent off before the end of this broadcast! And don’t forget to donate now and claim Gift Aid!
“They had no objection to his giving a video sermon to a gathering at Kensington and Chelsea town hall. We are also often told that, although al-Awlaki’s views may be unsavoury, he has never been convicted of any crime. Clearly, this excuse is simply not good enough.”
The excuse that he hasn’t done anything wrong.
Further, Hitchens Minor seems to be missing someone in his laudable crusade on the home front. I refer, of course, to the current and past tenants of Kensington & Chelsea Town Hall, or in other words, the Conservative Party in London. Could this perhaps have something to do with the fact that his boss at Policy Exchange is now the Conservative Mayor of London’s director of policy?
Dan Lockton would probably be interested in this…
The robot is this Bristol Robotics Lab project; both people in the thread at Jamie Zawinski’s I saw it in, and everyone I’ve shown it to, immediately think it looks like a cat.
In fact, in a sense, they do recognise it as a cat – it’s roughly the right size and shape, it’s in the right place, and if you wave a piece of string in its whiskers it responds much like a cat. But actually, as the project Web site tells us:
The robot was designed to reproduce the behaviour of rats as they use their whiskers to explore their environment. To get a clearer picture of how rats use their whiskers we filmed them using high speed video cameras (500fps) and manually tracked the position of each whisker in the array on a frame by frame basis. Software based automatic tracking is still very much in its infancy though there are a number of groups (including our Sheffield partners) who are now working toward such an application.The data from this whisker tracking allowed us to quantify the kinematics of whiskers as the rats explored novel environments. From this we found that following a whisker making contact with an object there was a very rapid (~13ms) change in the velocity profile of the ‘whisking’, or movement pattern of the whiskers. We also observed that the rat will tend to move, or orient, its nose toward the exact point of contact.
Our hypotheses were that the rat was trying to optimise the force applied by the whiskers making contact with the object as well as bringing as many addition whiskers as possible, and its nose for smelling, to bear on that point. The orienting behaviour we see as an example of a higher level control loop through the brain, very similar in nature to how we as visually dominant animals rapidly orient, or saccade, the fovea of our eyes toward interesting events detected by our peripheral vision.
To this end we designed our robot to mimic both the low level contact mediated adaptation of the whisker motion pattern and the ability to orient its ‘nose’ towards points in three dimensional space. Designing the physical robot to be capable of mimicking these behaviours allows us to test different computational models of the underlying brain structures which can control it.
So it’s a ratbot, and interestingly enough, it’s an example of a hardware simulation of a biological phenomenon.
But this is also an example of an interesting design phenomenon; if you want objects to be immediately comprehensible, it helps to use the patterns Dan details here; notably, in this case, similarity, mimicry, and role-playing. Everyone knows how to act around a cat; a robot, not so much. We’ve been trained to do so by cats. And this part of the project will be unavoidably cattish:
We hope to be able to demonstrate the validity of the proposed brain model by the robot being able to chase an object (perhaps a remote controlled car) moving through its whisker field
Aww. Also, our associations for cat- and also dog-like behaviour stimulate our curiosity towards them, in part because we project it on them. Just as making a new smartphone an interesting object to handle speeds the learning process, a robot that encourages curiosity and interaction towards itself will speed its users’ learning process.
I suspect that the response to the Bristol Scratchbot would have been rather different had we been told in advance that it was emulating a rat. (Special note – much of the robot was made on a rapid prototyper.)
Everyone’s taking the piss out of the Tories’ proposed £1m prize for a…something or other…ah,
an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges
Of course, it might be possible to make statements about this if only it was better specified. So everyone’s contented themselves with making fun of the press release and blaming blogs for the Iraq war. Or something. But underspecified is good in some ways…
If you want a proposal that could certainly be delivered for less than £1m, I’ve got one. Free Our Bills, MySociety.org’s proposed Web site to allow anyone to track the drafting process of UK legislation – to view amendments, make notes, monitor changes, and lobby Parliament in real time. Here’s my crack at a rough design of it, with a link to the Germans’ solution to the same problem.
Essentially, it’s a package manager for legislation – this talk at CCC describes relevant technology that’s actually being used for the Government’s data.gov.uk.
And you know what? David Cameron is on record supporting it. However, his party is also keen to fuck up anything the new Speaker, John Bercow, who is also sympathetic and is actually in charge of these things, wants – purely out of spite.
Also, if there’s any change left out of the cool million after that, you could even make a start on Who’s Lobbying – specifically, by setting up an internal registry of contacts with lobbyists for the Government. I asked Tom Watson MP about this last OpenTech – he thought there was no such log, which surprised me as it is something that would materially assist No.10 Downing Street and ministers in tracking what is actually happening in politics, quite apart from its utility as citizen technology.
But…the Government’s already promised to start doing it.
Whilst we’re on the subject, a couple of other terrorism things. Kingpin of Comedy Gladio, intimate of Patrick Mercer MP, and self-made spy Glen Jenvey has been arrested, ironically on charges of inciting hatred against Jews. He’s finally convinced somebody that he’s a real jihadi! Not that he’s likely to convince anyone else of anything at all…except Tories. The government must, indeed, look at these coincidences!
Meanwhile, in this season of prodigies, Ed Husain astonishingly says something quite sensible.
In both Britain and America demands for profiling all Muslims at airports are increasing in volume. This mindset not only fails to understand that most Muslims around the world detest al-Qaeda, but this outlook also cannot comprehend how terrorists are always one step ahead of the game. If it is Muslim-sounding names that are to be stopped, would a name like Richard Reid – the infamous shoe bomber – have been detected? If it is Asian men that are to be stopped, then we will see an increase in white men recruited for terror?After all, al-Qaeda’s English spokesperson is Adam Gadahn, a white American. If it is men who are stopped, we will see women terrorists emerge. Let us not forget Palestinian groups’ repeated use of single women as suicide bombers. Do not underestimate the power of terrorists to recruit serving airline pilots and other aviation personnel. Where there is a will, there will always be a way.
The profiling of ordinary Muslims not only opens other avenues for al-Qaeda, but results in the harassment and potential loss of support from the very people we need on our side to contain al-Qaeda: ordinary Muslims.
He also spends quite a lot of time romanticising Sufism, retailing whines about Obama bowing to the Saudi king, and saying things like this:
Nearly a decade after 9/11, when compared with military budgets, where is investment in these soft-power, counter radicalisation projects? The silence says it all.
Indeed it does, indeed it does. Strangely, he didn’t include a PayPal DONATE button. But it’s a start, I suppose, and we should reward good behaviour when we see it, even from the wanktank community. We Are Reasonable People, after all.
Someone who isn’t reasonable, however, is Con Coughlin:
It is easy to imagine that the authorities at UCL took quiet pride in the fact that they had a radical Nigerian Muslim running their Islamic Society. You can’t get more politically correct than that? They would therefore have had little interest in monitoring whether he was using a British university campus as a recruiting ground for al-Qaeda terrorists such as himself. The authorities at UCL should hang their heads in shame – or better than that, perhaps they should resign?
It may be easy to imagine that, but what are your offensive imaginings doing in something that claims to be a newspaper? Good job you only imagined it or else you could have been sued. It’s a bit like adumbrating that way.
Did Con Coughlin, perhaps, imagine the story about those Iraqi chemical weapons that he reckoned would fit on RPGs and be issued to air defence personnel so they could be launched in 45 minutes? The truth was considerably worse than that.
As you’ll probably have guessed, I’m not terrified by the pantsbomber. As Spencer Ackerman puts it:
it doesn’t do any good to blow this out of proportion, since blowing things out of proportion to spur an overreaction is Usama bin Laden’s explicit strategy
However, as more details have filtered out, I’ve revised my original view of it a tad. My first thought was that it was another very low-grade terrorist – probably a self-starter, with limited contacts, shaky technology, and worse execution. Therefore, I thought, there was a strong case to be made that he was a sign of terrorist weakness rather than strength. This is the best they can do? Pants.
With more information, however, it looks like he wasn’t quite as crap as that. On the other hand, everyone’s talking about his using a charge of PETN; if true, that would imply he had a contact for valid high explosive. But the fact he went fut rather than bang argues against this. PETN is the most sensitive of military explosives with the exception of nitroglycerine – it’s the stuff in detonator cord (Akzo-Nobel PDF – probably not one to read on the plane) – and as a result, it’s quite rare. Nobody wants explosives that explode when they shouldn’t. Had the main charge consisted of PETN, he should have exploded. (From the data sheet: NEVER attempt to cut by abrasion or blow with a sharp object!)
That, and the fact he was apparently seen fiddling with a syringe, suggests that this was yet another attempt to make the explosives at run-time as it were – as this comment at Bruce Schneier’s explains.
Fortunately, doing serious chemistry in your chuddies is not the way they do it at Bayer AG; a special problem is that the reaction he may have been aiming for is exothermic enough that the stuff (and him) would have caught fire before the job was done. If there was a detonator of some sort present, that might have gone up in the heat and panic, thus accounting for the small bang reported.
Come to think of it, a serious barrier to this plan would be enduring a powerfully exothermic reaction involving a strong acid in your crotch long enough to initiate the explosion…also, it seems impossible to avoid making a spectacle of yourself such that someone would spray your blazing boxers with an extinguisher and/or bash your head in with a crash axe long before you were ready to explode. As Bruce Schneier points out, bringing the explosive and the detonator on separately would be hard to detect…but it’s not clear that this is what pants boy actually did.
So, what does this tell us about the terrorist threat? I would argue I wasn’t too far out to begin with. This wasn’t a pathetic attempt, but it was still a weak, one-man job with poor technology and worse execution – just one of a slightly better class than we’ve had recently. And the startling bit is that far from being a self-radicaliser with a copy of the Anarchists’ Cookbook and the York Notes to the Holy Koran, he claims to have actually been in contact with real live Al-Qa’ida members. To begin with, I was dubious of this – he might have meant that he did it with the same aims as Al-Qa’ida, or that they inspired him to do it, or that he believed himself to be part of the wider movement, or perhaps that he was deluded in imagining himself to be in Al-Qa’ida.
But it seems he actually met with the real thing, and some accounts say they gave him the explosive device, such as it was. This strongly suggests that the terrorist threat is only as bad as it was before he set fire to his testicles – and possibly considerably less so. After all, an assessment before this would have had to state that there was at least the possibility of another well-organised, multiple attack, but that the track-record suggested that it was not very likely. Now we know that they had a go, and the outcome was a single attack with dodgy chemistry and bungled tactics.
This does not suggest that we need another wave of security bingeing. Arguably, the whole point of attacks like these and Al-Qa’ida international itself is to get our attention so that their local affiliates can pull off ones like these:
Regarding reports that a suicide bomber infiltrated deep into a U.S. forward operating base in Khost, Afghanistan, yesterday, killing seven CIA officers and seriously wounding six others, a former senior CIA official posted to the region writes:“Yes, Jaluddin [sic] Haqqani spent nearly 10 years fighting to get Khost back from the Soviets. That is his area and we were stupid to think he was going to let us stay there.
The anti-terrorism industry, of course, has to do something similar. The Undabomber’s bungling is already being reported as a “strategy of failure”; but this is silly. If you really wanted to create disruption without spending any money, you’d launch hoaxes, which cost nothing.
In related news, why are we not surprised that the fact he was in a database of over 500,000 suspects didn’t help much? Are there 500,000 terrorists? This is one of the legs of the false positive/false negative problem – the more people you include as suspects, the less dense in information that list becomes. Rather than looking for a needle in a haystack, the problem becomes more like looking for hay in a haystack. Yes, you’ll find it. Plenty of it…but what do you do then? You’ve just pushed the problem of filtering your information down the production line one step.
As Ackerman also points out, you have to make a decision about what to take seriously, or else the suspect list will overtake the population of the earth.
The response from the British and Dutch governments appears to be a sort of half-hearted pretend version of that after the last one; a bit like the attack.
The annual document dump under the 30 year rule is usually good for a story or two, but this year’s threw up something genuinely strange. Here’s Thatcher’s response to the Vietnamese boat people refugee crisis; some obvious Thatcher features are there – notably sanctimoniousness, vindictiveness, and the abiding right-wing tendency to mistake sarcasm for content:
When Whitelaw said his own postbag indicated a shift of opinion in favour of accepting more refugees, the prime minister said that “in her view all those who wrote letters in this sense should be invited to accept one into their homes. She thought it was quite wrong that immigrants should be given council housing whereas white citizens were not.”
(Nice Willie Whitelaw, as I believe one is legally required to refer to him, is in there as well, coming up with “a kind of steeplechase designed to weed out south Asians in particular”, which would seem to be a piece of deliberate official racism.)
But this bit is truly odd:
The papers, released at the National Archives today, show that her reluctance to take in any of the Vietnamese boat people led to her making a proposal to the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, that they jointly buy an Indonesian or Philippine island “not only as a staging post but as a place of settlement” for them all. This proposal was blocked by Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who feared it might become a “rival entrepreneurial city”.
The PM was seriously suggesting creating a new crown colony, in the year of our Lord, 1979? What? This requires a significant update in our understanding of a number of things in history, especially Anglo-Australian relations and the overseas military commitments. And you can’t miss the Minister Mentor himself’s swift move to prevent Hong Kong 2.0 from appearing on his doorstep.
The alternate history would be fascinating. I can easily imagine the Thatcherite-dystopia version (privatised nonfunctional water supplies, tax-haven jillionaires, enraged Filipino or Indonesian guerrillas and bewildered British infantry exchanging fire), as well as the Thatcher-fan version (low low tax city state, semiconductor fabs, banks etc). And, presumably, if the project hadn’t gone all Somali by 1999, it would have taken the place of Vancouver as a primary destination for Hong Kong emigrants.
By the early 80s there wouldn’t have been that much room for another semiconductor fabbing Asian city-state economy. Actually, I suspect the most likely development model would have been something like the Sharjah Airport Free Zone, and I’ve even got a candidate island or two – this one isn’t Indonesian or Filipino, but it is an old Royal Navy base with a deepwater anchorage and an airport, that’s since become a tax-haven. The runway is only 7,500 feet long, but there’s room to expand at one end – although not at the other, because there’s a golf course in the way and it’s these people’s culture, like.
Perhaps Paul Staines would have become mayor?
The actual documents are available here, although you’ll have to go through a silly rigmarole of using the National Archives webstore to pay them £0.00 and having them e-mail you a download link. And they are 30MB image files tucked into PDFs. (Usability FAIL.)
Come to think of it, she did have form for this sort of thing.
Other people’s TDLs. I note that this year’s CCC has devoted some time to the wanktank phenomenon in Germany, and also elsewhere. Volker Bilk’s slides are here; it makes a lot of sense, but there’s quite a bit of German philosophical maundering in there, and I’d have liked to see more case studies/howtos. As far as his call to action to map the wanktanks goes, I fully agree.
In other CCC presentations, it looks like there’s going to be a lot of GSM hacking in 2010. See here, here and here.
To-do lists are good. Grandad Bill lived by them; we found ones up-to-date for the day before he died. In that spirit, here’s a rough one for this blog in 2010:
1) Finally, end this twin-blog nightmare.
I’ve had requests from multiple readers for this. I think I’ll standardise on WordPress and host it myself somewhere. This may require some cunning SQL manipulation, as there are some differences between the two copies of the blog – some things got duplicated, some dropped, and of course there are comments on both from after the fork.
However, I am not going to bring back the JavaScript mousetrail clock.
2) Make an impact on WhoseKidAreYou
The git on hackernews who said that starting a USENET group for it was the best possible way to prevent the project making progress wasn’t wrong. In my defence, other matters frequently demanded my attention this autumn, and it does involve learning two new programming languages. As usual, the difficult bit turns out not to be the semantic-web query join across tens of thousands of crowdsourced records, but the bloody in-line parsing and tidying up of the bylines.
When the squid take over, they’ll realise that what we were doing all this time was HTML parsing and string processing.
3) Strike hard against press distortions
The news media is pissing me off more and more, and just shouting at them doesn’t seem enough. WKAY will help, especially when it gets to include things like Sourcewatch in its data sources. But what can we do in a positive sense?
4) Rapid reaction to Tories
I think this should be central, shouldn’t it? I’ve drivelled on about “pre-emptive activism” already, but I’d like to put some flesh on the idea and push it before they arrive – that’s the pre-emptive bit…
Before the blog goes quiet for the traditional Christmas ceasefire, I’d like to say that my grandfather, Paul William Gibbs, died yesterday. I’ll be posting something about him when I’ve finished writing it.
Now for the quiet.
More mystery jets. In the last couple of weeks there’s also been some progress on the 727 abandoned in North-Eastern Mali. For a start, it’s a 727, which is something. And, finally, there are pictures. The National of Abu Dhabi – a newspaper that is developing into a surprisingly useful source – has a good piece on the case and the growth of the Trans-Saharan drugs route more broadly.
Mr Lyman, a former US ambassador to both South Africa and Nigeria, warned that a heavy-handed approach by African officials would probably exacerbate the problem and threaten the desert region’s delicate security balance.
“Taking on the smuggling problem presents the danger of driving these tribal groups into the arms of AQIM because they resent a government presence that impinges on their smuggling activities, so it’s a delicate area how you increase in security” he said.
“You’ve got to build greater trust between Tuaregs and their home governments, and that requires more development and maybe even closing their eyes to some of the more benign smuggling activity that’s taking place. It’s not an easy task at all.”
Unsurprisingly, AFP wire service reporter Serge Daniel was the first journalist to get to the crash site, or more importantly, the first to file having done so. There are pictures of the wreck, which has been extensively scavenged for scrap metal; of course, the scrapmen will have helped to get rid of the evidence.
Hawa Semaga of Journal du Mali has an excellent piece which makes clear that the Guinea-Bissau authorities were looking for the plane at the time of its last flight, for a variety of reasons involving safety and registration violations. Further, it seems that the crew used false documents claiming that the aircraft was registered in Saudi Arabia. In yet another piece of useful information, the article confirms part of the route, and introduces the news that the plane passed through Cape Verde airspace on its way to the fateful airstrip, and then headed for Guinea-Bissau. They also suggest it stopped in Colombia as well as Venezuela.
My sources add that the current route was thought to be Dakar-Fortaleza-Panama-Maracaibo and then to the crash site, but there would have had to be intermediate stops between FOR and PTY and between MAR and Gao, as the sectors in question are 2,952 and 4,820 miles respectively. Replotting, with the new data:
(The map details are here.) That’s all possible, but the 727 would have needed a further South American stop between Fortaleza and Panama outward bound and between Maracaibo and Sal, Cape Verde inward bound – the simplest option would be to have gone via Maracaibo outward bound and via Fortaleza inward, which is marginal for the 727-200 (2,489 miles), but there might have been a fair wind that day.
Here’s their destination: N18.00031, W0.0031.
Bugger all is an understatement. This Senegalese Web site has a gripping account of a visit to the crash site, starting off with a roast sheep party, hours of gruelling desert travel, fear of stumbling on another clandestine landing, and proceeding to a chat with security sources. Key facts appear to be that the landing zone was prepared on a dry lakebed, that the aircraft was taxied off the hard surface into the sand, and that some five vehicles with Niger registration plates met it, but that the Niger plates were faked in another neighbouring country. There’s also some detail on the scavenging of the aircraft:
Mais ce 10 décembre 2009, je constate que l’appareil a perdu beaucoup de poids. Je trouve sur place la réponse : je vois des traces de tadjila, nourriture prisée chez les touaregs. Alors que s’est-il passé ? Des dizaines, et des dizaines de personnes dont des touaregs viennent s’installer et couper l’épave, récupérer de l’aluminium, et aller le vendre aux forgerons. 1 500 FCFA le kilo d’aluminium. Triste fin pour l’épave. Triste fin pour l’avion.
Everyone is now working on the assumption that the aircraft was deliberately destroyed. It’s possible that the aircraft was driven into the sand in order to give the impression of a runway excursion accident. The author states that the aircraft’s registration is visible, and that it’s South American, but he or she doesn’t say what it was.
Boeing 727-230F number 21619, currently the top suspect, was placed in storage in Dakar by “Africa Aviation Assistance” in June, with a view to ferrying the aircraft to Rio in July. This company was shut down in July after it turned out that its AOC had never been issued. Around about the same time, another 727-200 freighter, number 22644, operating for DHL under the Saudi registration HZ-SNE, was destroyed in an accident in Lagos. And, after this crash, the first 727 was registered HZ-SNE for a while.
I therefore guess that the fake Saudi documents were used to pretend that the 727 that ended up in the desert was actually HZ-SNE/22644, respectably carrying general cargo for DHL. AAA planned to register it in the Guinea-Bissau (J5-) registry; apparently they involved Guinea in some way, as the Guinea authorities were looking for the plane. But we know that if it used the registration J5-GGU at all, as previously thought, it was yet another fake.
It doesn’t seem obvious, though, that anyone would casually torch an aircraft that had the special feature of having a twin identity.
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