For reasons I don’t quite understand, I found myself not long after the accident reading a well-produced, glossy brochure published by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
While it contained a certain amount of other anti-Western propaganda, most of it was devoted to claims that they had brought down the aircraft. Not triumphalist crowing, though, it was a rather pathetic cry of ‘why doesn’t anybody believe us?’
It was clearly an accident, that was well enough known at the time and is even more evident now. But AQAP were desperate to be held responsible, it was almost pitiful reading their pleas.
I have my own theories about why this desperation.