Terrorism seeming more and more a possibility.
Air force chief: Malaysia jet may have turned back
Greg Barton, a professor of international politics at Australia's Monash University and a terrorism expert, said if the disaster was the result of terrorism, there is no obvious suspect. If it was terrorism, Barton expected China would be quick to blame separatists from the ethnic Uighur minority, as authorities did recently when 29 people were killed in knife attacks at a train station in the southern city of Kunming.
"If a group like that is behind it, then suddenly they've got a capacity that we didn't know they had before, they've executed it very well — that's very scary," Barton told AP.