If you're a frequent flier, you might want to avoid the Malaysian-Indonesian archipelago, for aircraft seem to have an odd habit of crashing (or simply disappearing). Yesterday I updated the Malaysia Air Flight 370 saga with the latest theory of a potential debris field in Cambodia. Then, of course, we have the highly suspicious crash of Lion Air flight 610, on an internal flight in Indonesia, which just "coincidentally" of course, had approximately twenty passengers from Indonesia's finance ministry aboard. We'll get back to that in a moment, but here's two articles about the crash shared by Mr. M.H.:

The Mystery of the New Boeing Jet That Plunged Into the Sea, Killing 189

Indonesian plane crashes into sea, all 189 on board feared dead

Now, I don't know about you, but when airliners crash with twenty people from a country's finance ministry aboard, my suspicion meter goes into the red zone. Mr. M.H. pointed out something interesting from the second article:

At least 23 government officials, four employees of state tin miner PT Timah and three employees of a Timah subsidiary, were on the plane. A Lion Air official said one Italian passenger and an Indian pilot were on board. Speaking at a hospital, a tearful Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati paid tribute to the 21 officials from her ministry on the doomed flight who she said "died doing their duty".

As for Finance Minister Sri Nulyani Indrawati, Mr. M.H. also noted this about the Wikipedia article on her:

Sri Mulyani Indrawati - (born 26 August 1962) is an Indonesian economist who has been Minister of Finance of Indonesia since 2016; previously she served in the same post from 2005 to 2010. In June 2010 she was appointed as Managing Director of the World Bank Group and resigned as Minister of Finance. On July 27, 2016, Sri Mulyani was reappointed as Minister of Finance in a cabinet reshuffle by President Joko Widodo, replacing Bambang Permadi Soemantri Brodjonegoro.[1] As finance minister from 2005 to 2010, Sri Mulyani was known as a tough reformist[2][3] and was largely credited with strengthening Indonesia's economy, increasing investments and steering Southeast Asia's largest economy through the 2007–10 financial crisis.[4][5] In 2014, she was ranked as the 38th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine.[6]

All of which led Mr. M.H. to suspect that this crash, with its sudden plunge at 350 mph into the ocean, as not accidental. When I learned of the crash, and of the people on board, I thought the same thing. Then a pilot and engineer who shall remain nameless, and who has some experience with Boeing aircraft contacted me privately with his own suspicions that the odd flight pattern indicated that the aircraft had been commandeered "from outside" and literally flown into the ocean.

So the question, if this was deliberate sabotage and murder, is why? There's two things here that make me incredibly suspicious: (1) Ms. Indrawati herself, and (2) the mining company. Indrawati, given her high positions both in the World Bank Group and in the Indonesian ministry of finance, would be in a position to "know things," especially if as the Wikipedia article suggests, she helped steer Indonesia through the 2008 financial crisis. She may indeed know things about that crisis that certain people would want to ensure she keep quiet about.

It's the mining company, though, that caught my interest. Tin is of course a valuable commodity. The Indonesian oil fields and tin mines were a strategic objective of the Japanese Empire during World War Two. But there's a very loose, high octane speculation here that hovers over the whole affair, and that's Indonesian premier Sukharno, and his gold. (See BANKS AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE PART TWO: THE BEARER BONDS ...)

In other words, people high in the Indonesian financial structure are likely to know a great deal of the history of hidden finance, and thus my high octane suspicion here is twofold: (1) someone is sending messages to Indonesia, and (2) I strongly suspect that those unfortunate passengers on flight 610 with connections both to the Indonesian finance ministry, and to the PT Timah mining operation, may either have been journeying to a final destination other than Pangkal Pinang, or that they were to meet people in that Indonesian city that have, as yet, not been disclosed.

The unfortunate thing here is that time, in this case, may not tell... But it's not the first time Indonesia has been targeted. Don't forget that tsunami came about one week after a sudden and inexplicable sell-off of Indonesian sovereign securities...

See you on the flip side...