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Administered by the
United Kingdom but home to a US Naval Base, the island has had no indigenous
inhabitants since they were forcibly relocated to other islands in the Chagos
Archipelago, as well as Mauritius and the Seychelles, in 1971.
The island is so little-known
that it has been rumoured that the US authorities have used it as a base for a
secret prison. Even its name is suggestive of a Bond villain.
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It has a runway large
enough to accommodate commercial aircraft — and was even deemed suitable for a
landing by the US Space Shuttles in the event of an emergency.
Because of its remoteness
and its runway, Diego Garcia has been suggested as a possible location for
missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
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An FBI
investigation found “nothing sinister” about the flight simulator files, but
attention has returned to MH370’s pilot after it was reported that the plane
had deliberately avoided radar detection in the early hours of March 8 by skirting
around Indonesian airspace.
The idea
that MH370 landed in Diego Garcia has been championed by American blogger Jim Stone, whose
website presents a bewildering array of theories about major news events.
Stone has
claimed that an American MH370 passenger, Philip Wood, managed to send a text
from his iPhone stating that he was being held hostage by unknown military
personnel, along with GPS coordinates. Those coordinates revealed a location a
few kilometres away from Diego Garcia, Stone claimed.
However,
contributors to the website Metabunk have argued that it is quite easy to fake a
mobile phone’s GPS coordinates.
Analysis of
flight information — and the recent detection of underwater signals believed to have come from
a black box flight recorder — point strongly to the theory that MH370 met its
end in the waters of the southern Indian Ocean.
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"I've
never seen a jet flying so low over our island before. We've seen seaplanes,
but I'm sure that this was not one of those. I could even make out the doors on
the plane clearly," the website quoted one witness as saying.
Haveeru
journalist Farah Ahmed said several witnesses had given similar accounts.
"These
people first heard a very loud noise from a plane flying unusually low and they
came out to see it," Ahmed told AFP by phone from the Maldives capital
Male, whose international airport daily handles dozens of wide-body jets
bringing in thousands of tourists.
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