When a mysterious plane was intercepted on August 14 in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, by local authorities, Karim Asaad, an investigative journalist working for an Egyptian fact-checking platform matsada2sh got to work.
What he found was a complex network of passengers on board a plane with a suspicious flight path that included recent stops in Dubai, UAE; Tel Aviv, Israel; Cairo, Egypt; and Benghazi and Tripoli, Libya.
On August 19, Egyptian authorities arrested Asaad at his home in the al-Shorouk neighbourhood in eastern Cairo.
Matsada2sh says security forces assaulted Asaad’s wife and threatened their child in the process.
He has since been released, but why were the Egyptian security forces so threatened by the information released? Here is what you need to know about the mysterious plane, its passengers and its cargo:
Through open-source data and online flight trackers, matsada2sh was able to reveal a trail of suspicious flight paths in which the plane, a high-speed corporate Bombardier, appeared to fly unfettered across multiple locations.
According to the data, the plane appears to have been registered in San Marino but operated by an office in Dubai that was connected to an aircraft rental service in Antwerp, Belgium. The aircraft owner had asked FlightAware, the world’s largest flight tracking platform, not to track the plane’s flights and to withhold flight information from the public.
Source: Aljazeera.com
