But you'd have to know that cargo was going to be on board beforehand. From the sounds of it, the pilots were well prepared to execute this plan. Assuming of course this is even remotely what really happened.
Passenger lists would be known in advance. My guess is if they wanted some piece of material/cargo enough to pull off an operation like this, they would have just taken the cargo itself. It would presumably be something so valuable/unique that the owner wasn't going to just file a "missing baggage" claim. If it was about cargo, it would also seem that it would be more efficient to steal the cargo, and then blow up the plane. That would make the original owner of the item believe it was permanently lost/destroyed vs. being in this unknown state, and possibly giving the owner time to react or inform other governments.
Provided that the plane was deliberately flown in-tact to an unknown location, my personal guess would be that this was about 1 or more individuals on the plane specifically.
I also doubt it's about the plane itself. This specific plane is now a highly visible piece of equipment, and it would be fairly easy to obtain planes with similar load-bearing capacity in less obvious means.
Passenger lists would be known in advance. My guess is if they wanted some piece of material/cargo enough to pull off an operation like this, they would have just taken the cargo itself. It would presumably be something so valuable/unique that the owner wasn't going to just file a "missing baggage" claim. If it was about cargo, it would also seem that it would be more efficient to steal the cargo, and then blow up the plane. That would make the original owner of the item believe it was permanently lost/destroyed vs. being in this unknown state, and possibly giving the owner time to react or inform other governments.
Provided that the plane was deliberately flown in-tact to an unknown location, my personal guess would be that this was about 1 or more individuals on the plane specifically.
I also doubt it's about the plane itself. This specific plane is now a highly visible piece of equipment, and it would be fairly easy to obtain planes with similar load-bearing capacity in less obvious means.