Satellite images from around four days ago and analysed extensively by the Australian government, have been transmitted to the Malaysian authorities and released earlier today, our time.
They show two large objects, the larger around 24 metres long, floating together well offshore the south west point of Australia.
Since the tides in this area are strong, even if this is debris from the MH370, it does not mean that this is the site of the downing of the aircraft.
If it proves to be from the MH730, this will not be confirmed for some time, given the distances involved, although several serious surveillance aircraft are now going to the area, including an American P-8A Poseidon.
The question – which has always been a silent issue and now becomes a live one, is that if this is indeed the MH730, its passage down through the Indian Ocean to the point where it ran out of fuel simply must have been picked up by the controversial and gigantic USA base at Diego Garcia in the Chagos islands archipelago, south west of the Maldives.
This base has the most powerful radar assembly in the world – it is Diego Garcia’s strategic position in the vast expanses of ocean down there that made it so important for American surveillance that Britain under Prime Minister Harold Wilson, dispossessed the native islanders by deceit and leased the islands to America.
It is highly secret, is regularly the focus of publicity in the sustained campaign of the Chagos islanders to return home and has recently been back in the news as causing major pollution to important coral beds. Ships have for decades been discharging effluent in the environmentally important lagoon.
It is far from unlikely that, if the MH370 finally went into the southern Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia’s surveillance reach would be a matter the Americans would not wish to disclose.
