Putin ordered Russian special forces to steal MH370 and secretly landed it

Jeff Wise, a U.S. science writer who spearheaded CNN's coverage of the Boeing 777-200E, has based his outlandish theory on pings that the plane gave off for seven hours after it went missing, that were recorded by British telecommunications company Inmarsat.

Wise believes that hijackers 'spoofed' the plane's navigation data to make it seem like it went in another direction, but flew it to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia.

However Wise admits in New York Magazine that he does not know why Vladimir Putin would want to steal a plane full of people and that his idea is somewhat 'crazy'.

'If Russia has the savvy to plan an insanely complex special operation, they also have a track record of implementing such schemes,' Wise wrote on his website.

'Kazakhstan lacks the means and technical savvy to carry out a sophisticated hijack, the same is not true of Russia. 

'Russia is (arguably) the only country that stands apart from the West and yet is as technically advanced in the aerospace industry as the United States.' 

Wise admits he does not know why Vladimir Putin would want to steal a plane full of people and that his idea is somewhat 'crazy'.

'Maybe he wanted to demonstrate to the United States, which had imposed the first punitive sanctions on Russia the day before, that he could hurt the West and its allies anywhere in the world,' Wise wrote in New York Magazine.

'Maybe what he was really after were the secrets of one of the plane’s passengers.

'Maybe there was something strategically crucial in the hold. 

'Or maybe he wanted the plane to show up unexpectedly somewhere someday, packed with explosives. 

'There’s no way to know.' 

Wise also noted there were three Russian men onboard the flight, two of them Ukrainian passport holders. 

The theory follows a new documentary that claims MH370 was deliberately flown off course by someone in the cockpit.

Aviation disaster experts analyzed satellite data and discovered - like the data recorded by Inmarsat - that the plane flew on for hours after losing contact.

Careful examination of the evidence has revealed that MH370 made three turns after the last radio call, first a turn to the left, then two more, taking the plane west, then south towards Antarctica. 

According to Malcolm Brenner, a world's leading expert in the causes of aviation disasters, those turns 'strongly suggest' someone in the cockpit deliberately flew MH370 off course.

'This accident has caught the attention of the world in a way I have not seen in a forty-year career in aviation,' Mr Brenner says.  

The claims are being made in a new National Geographic documentary out next month where Mr Brenner and a team of experts try to solve the mystery of MH370. 

This follows confident claims by the Australian co-ordinator of the search that the doomed jetliner will be found within the next few months.

(dailymail.co.uk)