Bits and Bites from Around the World > Man tells 4 y/o to shoot cops; Info points to murder-suicide by pilot of MH370

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Four-year-old told to fire gun at officers – police

The child’s parent had allegedly been angered over an incorrect order

at a McDonald’s drive-through in the US state of Utah 

FILE PHOTO © Getty Images / anadorado

A father told his four-year-old child to fire a gun at officers following a dispute over a McDonald’s order, police in Utah have said. The gun was seized from the child just as it was fired. 

The incident happened on Monday lunchtime at a drive-through restaurant in Midvale, in suburban Salt Lake City. The unidentified 21-year-old man had begun arguing with staff, demanding his order be corrected while brandishing a gun in their direction, Unified Police spokeswoman Sergeant Melody Cutler told the media. 

Staff corrected his order, asked him to move into a waiting area, and called the police. The disgruntled customer apparently failed to cooperate with the attending officers and had to be pulled from his vehicle. The agents then spotted the child holding the gun, which was pointed towards them. An officer managed to push the gun to one side as it was fired, receiving a minor injury to his arm as he did so.

According to Sgt Cutler, the officer in question shouted “Kid!”, alerting his colleagues not to fire back at the four-year-old. A witness informed the police that they had heard the father tell the child, who was in the backseat with a three-year-old sibling, to shoot at the cops, Cutler said.

The father remains in custody and Unified Police say the incident is currently an “active investigation.”

The idiot should never be allowed near his children again. As I see it, it was attempted murder by proxy, of a cop, or more than one. 

Pilot's baffling 22 minute manoeuvre which could hold the key

to proving MH370 mystery WAS a murder-suicide

On March 8 in 2014, the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared from view

By ANDREW PRENTICE FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA

PUBLISHED: 09:16 EST, 23 February 2022

A bizarre 22-minute manoeuvre could prove the doomed MH370 flight was actually a murder-suicide plot by one of the pilots, a top Australian pilot has claimed.

On March 8 in 2014, the Malaysian Airlines plane disappeared from the skies along with 239 people on board - including six Australians.

They included Queensland couples Catherine and Robert Lawton as well as Mary and Rodney Burrows.

Many wild theories have since followed, but now a flight holding pattern - detected through an invisible trail - may finally provide closure for those who lost loved ones.

In Wednesday night's Sky News documentary MH370: The Final Search, a number of aviation leaders stated it was deliberate sabotage from senior flight Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah - and said a 22-minute-long holding pattern proved it.

'My theory has always been that it was the captain who is responsible …probably as a political protest,' aviation writer and former Qantas Captain Mike Glynn said. 

In Wednesday night's Sky News documentary MH370: The Final Search, a number of aviation experts

stated their belief it was deliberate sabotage from senior flight Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah

This graphic shows the predicted location for MH370's wreckage at the bottom of the Indian Ocean

On March 8 in 2014, the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared from the skies with 239 people on board

To support his claim, Mr Glynn pointed to the 'holding pattern' on MH370 from 3.12am onwards.

A holding pattern is where a plane holds a particular flight path while awaiting approval to land, but in this case it was done mid-flight. 

He said there was 'no reason' for the aircraft to engage in the pattern mid-flight, before adding there is a 'possibility' it was the timeframe Mr Shah used as a 'form of negotiation.'

Australian Danica Weeks, whose husband Paul was on board the flight, said the 22-minute holding pattern revelation was 'overwhelming' and that Captain Shah 'must've been talking to someone… it's just a complete cover up.'

Mr Glynn went on to claim Captain Shah, a married father of three, was enraged after Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s Opposition Leader at the time of the crash in 2014, was convicted of sodomy the day before MH370 disappeared.

Shah was said to be an avid supporter of Ibrahim, and the pilot's Facebook account was also labelled a 'treasure trove' of political activity and anti-government sentiment.

Leading aviation safety investigator and retired pilot, John Cox, also said the demise of MH370 was no accident.

Author and journalist Ean Higgins agreed, stating Mr Shah had enough motivation if he wanted to take the 'drastic action.'

The pilot did have a supporter in Malaysia Airlines Crisis Director Fuad Sharuji, who expressed his doubt over a possible plane hijack.

The final point of control tower contact with flight MH370 almost eight years ago was over the South China Sea, the location where the search first launched following the disappearance, which generated international headlines.

However, it soon became apparent the plane had made its way back in the direction of Malaysia.

The aircraft then flew over the Malay peninsula, went around the island of Penang and up the Malacca Strait and eventually over the southern Indian Ocean.

Mr Glynn went on to state the use of Weak Signal Propagation Report (WSPR), could help locate the final remains of the plane.

The modern technology is a network of signals that use amateur or hand radios, and has been in use since 2009.

The pilot believes MH370 may have been tracked by WSPR - and that could pinpoint where the remains are.

'It is a game changer,' he said.

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Fascinating and Terrifying New Theory on the Disappearance of MH370

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What really happened to Flight MH370?

Seven years after the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines plane, a French investigative journalist says she's getting closer to the truth

By Martin Fletcher, The Telegraph

30 January 2021 • 6:00am

When Flight MH370 disappeared, conspiracy theories quickly emerged  CREDIT: AP Images

Nobody disputes the initial facts – not even Florence de Changy, a French journalist whose new book on the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is about to revive the greatest mystery in aviation history.

At 00:42 on 8 March 2014, MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport bound for Beijing. On board the Boeing 777 were two pilots, 10 flight attendants and 227 passengers of 14 different nationalities. They included Chinese labourers and package- holiday tourists going home, a group of calligraphers, a stuntman who was working on a new Netflix series, and 20 employees of a US electronics company. Five were children.

At 01:01 MH370 reached its cruising altitude of 35,000ft as it flew north over the South China Sea. At 01:19, as it left Malaysian airspace and crossed into Vietnam’s, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the captain, radioed back the last words heard from the flight: ‘Good night Malaysian Three Seven Zero.’

Normal procedure is that the aircraft should then declare its presence to Vietnamese air traffic control but no call came. A minute later the plane’s transponder – its link to air traffic control – cut off.

Almost immediately its Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which transmits technical information about flights, ceased working too. Thereafter MH370 simply vanished.

It issued no distress call. It had displayed no sign of trouble. On a clear night, in good flying conditions, one of the world’s safest aircraft, operated by an airline with an excellent safety record, disappeared in a region full of civilian and military radar stations and heavily monitored by satellites.

Seven years later, incredibly, its fate remains unknown.

The search effort begins

For a week, scores of ships and planes searched the South China Sea for traces of the missing plane. Then, on 15 March, Najib Razak, Malaysia’s then-prime minister, announced startling new findings. He said that an aircraft believed (but not confirmed) to be MH370 had been detected suddenly changing course after entering Vietnamese airspace.

He also advanced the theory that these movements were ‘consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane’. That is the point at which de Changy starts taking issue with an official narrative which she dismisses as a ‘fabrication’.

According to that narrative, Malaysian military radar had spotted a plane climbing and descending steeply as it flew back across the Malay peninsula, veered up the Malacca Strait and round the northern tip of Sumatra into the Indian Ocean.

Thereafter Inmarsat, a satellite telecommunications company, picked up occasional electronic ‘pings’ from the aircraft. From those pings, scientists calculated that MH370 may have flown six hours southwards after rounding Sumatra before crashing into the sea more than a thousand miles west of Australia, having presumably run out of fuel.

The narrative was subsequently reinforced by the discovery, a year later, of debris apparently belonging to MH370 washed up on the beaches of southern Africa and the island of Réunion on the far side of the Indian Ocean.

Inmarsat’s calculations triggered the most expensive search in aviation history. For nearly three years, at a cost of well over £100 million, more than 100 ships and dozens of aircraft from 24 countries scoured 120,000 square kilometres of ocean. They found nothing except a pair of 19th-century shipwrecks.

In 2017 the underwater search was called off and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which coordinated it, issued a report that said it was ‘almost inconceivable’ that a plane could simply go missing in the modern age.

A distraught relative of a Flight 370 passenger waits for news at a Beijing hotel CREDIT: AFP via Getty Images

In 2018, to the dismay of the victims’ relatives, a final report by an official investigation team, comprising experts from Malaysia, Australia, the US, China, Britain, Indonesia, Singapore and France, likewise failed to explain MH370’s disappearance, though it did not rule out ‘unlawful interference by a third party’.

Inside the conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories thrive in vacuums. This case was no exception. Fuelled by the lack of hard facts and by the opacity, contradictions and apparent inconsistencies of the authorities, they proliferated.

Some were manifestly crazy. MH370 had vanished into a black hole, or been captured by aliens, or seized for use in another 9/11-style attack. The missing plane was said to be in Somalia, Kazakhstan or North Korea, or rumoured to have been destroyed to eliminate witnesses to an organ-harvesting scheme run by a top Chinese official’s son.

Other theories were superficially more plausible. A terrorist hijacking was a leading contender, but why would the captain in his fortified cockpit not have issued any sort of alarm? Why would the terrorists not have claimed responsibility or made demands? Why would they fly the plane to the middle of the sea, not an airport? And none of the passengers were deemed likely hijackers.

Another possibility was a fire or some sort of catastrophic accident, leading to a lack of oxygen that swiftly killed all those on board. Certainly there was a consignment of potentially flammable lithium-ion batteries in the hold. But the cockpit had its own emergency oxygen supply, and would the plane really have followed the erratic course it did on automatic pilot?

The leading theory, encouraged by the former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, who was in office when MH370 vanished, was that the pilot was suicidal and deliberately crashed the plane into the sea. ‘I want to be absolutely crystal clear, it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot,’ he told a Sky News documentary last year.

Australian pm Tony Abbott declared the crash ‘murder-suicide’ CREDIT: AFP via Getty Images

Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s marriage was rumoured to have been in difficulty. A flight simulator in his house had allegedly been used to plot a course to the southern Indian Ocean. But investigators concluded that the data wasn’t incriminating, and the official investigation found no evidence that Zaharie, who had an exemplary 16-year record of flying Boeing 777s, was suffering mental health problems.

If he was bent on suicide, why would his co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, not have tried to stop him? And unless he craved one final ‘joyride’, why would he not have crashed the plane immediately?

Who is Florence de Changy?

De Changy, 53, is no crank. Personable and articulate, she is a reputable journalist who has covered South East Asia for Le Monde and Radio France for two decades. She previously lived in Malaysia for three years and is now based in Hong Kong.

The day MH370 went missing she was visiting her childhood home in Verona and heard the news on the radio of her rented car. ‘My first thought was, what a shame I’m not nearby because there was a chance Le Monde would send me,’ she recalls in a Skype call from her houseboat in Hong Kong.

The day she returned to Hong Kong, one week later, Najib Razak announced that MH370 had been deliberately diverted. Before she could unpack, Le Monde dispatched her to Kuala Lumpur. At that point, she says, ‘You have no reason to doubt what they told you… it’s natural to be gullible’.

French journalist Florence de Changy, whose new book delves into the mystery of MH370 CREDIT: John Javellana

On the first anniversary of the plane’s disappearance she wrote a long article in which she was considerably more sceptical about the official narrative. That led to a book, published in 2016, in which she cautiously suggested the lost plane might not be in the Indian Ocean at all, but in the South China Sea where it was originally presumed to have crashed.

‘I was almost embarrassed with what I was coming up with,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to go there. You know it’s very bad to be a conspiracy theorist.’

But the book prompted people to approach her with new information and before she knew it, she was ‘down the rabbit hole’.

Since then, she has visited at least 15 countries on four continents in her quest for the truth. She has interviewed hundreds of people, from fishermen in the Maldives who claimed to have seen a huge plane labouring low and noisily over their remote island early on the morning MH370 went missing, to a former officer of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army who shared her suspicion of the official narrative.

‘The whole narrative is an insult to human intelligence,’ she says. ‘It’s really crazy. It doesn’t make sense to tell the world that we’ve lost track of a Boeing 777… If, as a journalist, I don’t react to that then I might as well go and sell socks or ties.’

Where did the plane go down?

De Changy’s first and unequivocal contention in her new book, The Disappearing Act, which is published next week, is that indeed MH370 went down in the South China Sea, as first suspected, not thousands of miles away in the Indian Ocean.

She points to the lack of a single radar image conclusively showing the plane heading west then south, even though two major military exercises were taking place near its alleged route. In her book, she suggests the few images that do exist might have been of other planes, and that the erratic flight pattern of the plane said to be MH370 exceeded the performance capabilities of a Boeing 777.

Thereafter, she argues that ‘no one – not one single person, not a radar, not a ship, not a satellite, not a military base, not another plane – saw MH370 above the southern Indian Ocean’, and that the largest search operation ever mounted ‘failed to find a shred of evidence’ that it crashed there.

And what of those electronic ‘pings’ that indicated the plane had continued flying for hours? ‘This despotic set of pings had, I felt, imposed its version of the truth on the whole world,’ she writes. She suggests that they might have been generated in some other way, possibly by other planes.

As for the ‘avalanche of debris’ discovered on the shores of Réunion and southern Africa, she insists that the supposed ‘finds’ amounted to collective wishful thinking and had nothing to do with MH370. She writes: ‘“Highly likely” and “almost certain” were very soon the buzz phrases used to qualify any kind of debris collected in the south-western part of the Indian Ocean that bore even the remotest possibility of having come from MH370.’

The official narrative, de Changy concludes, ‘has every semblance of a decoy’.

It’s quite a claim. But she’s not finished. ‘Almost seven years after the loss of the plane, the authorities’ version of what happened to MH370 is even less credible than when it first surfaced,’ she writes. ‘The primary function of the sub-sea search led by Australia in international waters was simply to keep people’s attention focused somewhere, just like the diversion that any magician employs to mask his sleight of hand.’

De Changy then marshals the evidence supporting her contention that the plane went down in the South China Sea. It includes contemporary Vietnamese news reports to that effect; a mysterious message from Vietnamese air traffic control to its Malaysian counterpart at 02:40 saying ‘the plane is landing’; Chinese media reports of an SOS from the pilot at 02:43 requesting an emergency landing because his plane was disintegrating; Chinese satellite images of apparent debris littering the water; and two large oil slicks allegedly spotted off Vietnam’s coast.

2018: a girl has her face painted during the Day of Remembrance for MH370 event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia CREDIT: AP

She says villagers and fishermen along Malaysia’s north-eastern coast reported unusual sights and sounds including explosions early that morning, and a New Zealand oil worker, Michael McKay, reported seeing a ‘burning plane’ in the sky from his platform off the southern tip of Vietnam.

Evidence was ‘ignored, dismissed, denied or just erased’, she claims. High-resolution satellite images of the South China Sea that might have identified floating debris were later mysteriously unavailable. An unedited transcript of all the exchanges between MH370 and Malaysian air traffic control during its 42 minutes of flight was never published.

De Changy also claims that, in a change from usual practice, movements for ships of the US Seventh Fleet, based in Japan, were not published on the website of US Pacific Command for a month each side of MH370’s disappearance.

Having interviewed Zaharie’s friends and relatives, she also asserts that he was the ‘target of a relentless smear campaign’ and ‘never had the slightest of deadly intentions’. He was a ‘perfectly sane and happy pilot, operating at the top of his game’. If he was the culprit, he did ‘what no one else has ever managed to do: lose his plane and all those on board for ever, without leaving the slightest trace’.

Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah CREDIT: Sim

De Changy cannot be faulted for her tenacity, but three aviation experts who have followed the case gave little credence to her claim that MH370 lies in the South China Sea. ‘I think it’s pretty far-fetched,’ says a former senior British government official who declined to be named.

‘This is just nonsense. We know where the aircraft went down,’ says Duncan Steel, one of several independent scientists, engineers and mathematicians who pooled their expertise in order to try to solve the mystery.

David McMillan, former chair of the global Flight Safety Foundation, allowed some ‘room for doubt’ given the lack of hard facts, but added: ‘The broad consensus is that people were looking in pretty much the right place.’

Relatives of the victims were similarly sceptical. ‘As of now, the only evidence we have is that the plane ended its flight in the southern Indian Ocean,’ says Grace Subathirai Nathan, a Malaysian lawyer whose mother was on board MH370. Journalists like de Changy are free to pursue their investigations, she adds, ‘but it’s not easy to constantly have to talk about it, constantly have to remember it'.

KS Narendran, a development consultant, who lives in Chennai, lost his wife on MH370. In a Skype call, he said of the official narrative: ‘It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t square up. There’s nothing conclusive about it.’ But neither did he endorse de Changy’s theory.

De Changy’s hypothesis also begs the question: why would anyone want to conceal the fact that MH370 crashed into the South China Sea, if indeed it did?

'A massive blunder of unspeakable proportions'

In the book’s final chapter she attempts to answer that. She believes that the story was designed to detract from ‘a massive blunder of unspeakable proportions’ – namely that the plane was shot down. And she proceeds to sketch out a hypothetical scenario which, despite some ‘holes’, she believes to be ‘80 per cent’ correct.

In it, MH370 was carrying stolen technology, perhaps a powerful spying device. The US had to stop that precious load reaching China. It dispatched two Awacs planes to jam MH370’s communication systems, effectively rendering it invisible, then force it to land at a nearby military airport where the cargo could be removed. When Zaharie refused to land, the Americans shot the plane down before it entered Chinese airspace.

‘The shooting down could have been a blunder, but it could also have been a last resort to stop the plane and its special cargo from falling into China’s hands,’ she writes.

De Changy contends that the US and China had obvious reasons to conceal the truth, and that her scenario, though hypothetical, is ‘based on a cluster of solid clues’. She goes on to claim that stories were planted to promote the official narrative.

Is this the wildest conspiracy theory of all? Is de Changy merely the latest MH370 obsessive to be sucked into what she calls ‘the dark recesses of the labyrinth’ of this mystery?

A Malaysia Airlines employee writes a message of prayer at Kuala Lumpur airport a week after the crash

CREDIT:  AFP via Getty Images

The relatives of some victims are reluctant to believe it. Grace Nathan said it sounded ‘quite far-fetched’, adding: ‘It’s highly impossible all this happened in a short span of 20 minutes, completely unnoticed.’ KS Narendran observed that ‘there are easier ways for a government such as the US to deliver things that it wants to, or eliminate people if it chooses to’ than shooting down a commercial airliner.

Moreover, if de Changy’s scenario were true, hundreds of people in many different countries and organisations would be complicit, and the secret would surely have spilt by now.

On the other hand, if the USAF was willing to shoot down a plane full of civilians to protect a secret, why would anyone feel safe coming forward.

De Changy acknowledges that, but says she is confident people will yet come forward with the final bits of the jigsaw. ‘I’m almost there,’ she insists.

The official investigation has long concluded and only a secretive French judicial investigation continues into who or what killed four of its citizens on that flight. But in a final push for the truth, de Changy dedicates her book to ‘all those who know something more’ – those ‘who are duty bound to reveal their share of the truth and end the terrible distress of the victims’ loved ones’.

The Disappearing Act, by Florence de Changy, is out on Thursday (HarperCollins, £14.99); preorder it now at books.telegraph.co.uk

Coronavirus: Chinese CDC Now Says The Wuhan Wet Market Wasn't The Origin of The Virus

AYLIN WOODWARD, BUSINESS INSIDER

Experts still don't know where the new coronavirus came from.

Genetic evidence has all but confirmed that the virus originated in Chinese bats before it jumped to humans via an intermediary animal host. But where and how that spillover first happened is still up for debate.

Initially, authorities in Wuhan, China, reported that the first cases of the virus emerged at the local Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

But following an investigation of the animals sold there, the Chinese Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said this week that it has ruled the site out as the origin point of the outbreak.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese CDC, told Chinese state media: "It now turns out that the market is one of the victims."

Samples collected from animals at the market came back negative for the new coronavirus, suggesting that they couldn't have infected shoppers.

Wuhan authorities first informed the World Health Organisation (WHO) about the unknown, pneumonia-like illness that would later be identified as the new coronavirus on December 31.

A majority of the initial 41 cases were linked to the wet market, which was shut down on January 1.

Given that the SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003 started at a similar venue in Guangdong, China, the wet market seemed like a logical origin. (The SARS coronavirus jumped from bats to civet cats to people.)

But none of the animals at the market tested positive for the virus, Colin Carlson, a zoologist at Georgetown University told Live Science. If they were never infected, they couldn't have been the intermediary host that facilitated the spillover.

A growing body of research supports the Chinese CDC's conclusion that the outbreak's origins were unrelated to the market.

The virus seems to have been circulating in Wuhan before those 41 cases were reported: Research published in January showed that the first person to test positive for the coronavirus was likely exposed to it on December 1, then showed symptoms on December 8.

The researchers behind the study also found that 13 of the 41 original cases showed no link to the wet market.

Similarly, an April study suggested that the coronavirus had already established itself and begun spreading in the Wuhan community by early January.

The identity of "patient zero" hasn't been confirmed, but it may have been a 55-year-old man from China's Hubei province who was infected on November 17, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), which reviewed government documents.

Or, it might have been a scientist, Yanling Huang, working at the lab, who disappeared, and her name was removed from the lab's website:

A dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion >

The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China.

It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government:

covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, 

destroying evidence of it in laboratories and 

refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.

The wet market could have been the site of a super-spreader event

Carlson told Live Science that the Wuhan wet market may simply have been the site of an early super-spreader event – an instance in which one sick person infects an atypically large number of others.

Other super-spreader events around the world have also created clusters of infections that cropped up almost overnight. In Daegu, South Korea, for example, one churchgoer infected at least 43 people.

These instances don't necessarily involve a person who is more contagious than others or sheds more viral particles. Rather, the infected person has access to a greater number of people in spaces that facilitate infection. A market, in which shoppers interact with one another and vendors in close quarters, is one such risky place.

The coronavirus also probably did not leak from a lab

Lingering questions about the pandemic's origin have given rise to a range of unsubstantiated theories. One suggests the coronavirus may have accidentally leaked from a local laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in which scientists were researching coronaviruses.

Amazing! It started down the street from a lab where they were working on that very thing, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence.

But both Chinese and US researchers said there's no evidence to support that theory. The high-security lab says it has no record of the novel coronavirus' genome, and it follows strict safety measures.

The director of the WIV, Wang Yanyi, told China Central Television last weekend that the new coronavirus is genetically different from any kind of live virus that has been studied at the institute.

Prior to that, WIV virologist Shi Zhengli – who collects, samples, and studies coronaviruses in Chinese bats – told Scientific American that she cross-referenced the new coronavirus' genome with the genetic information of other bat coronaviruses her team had collected. They didn't find a match.

"That really took a load off my mind," Shi said in March, adding, "I had not slept a wink for days."

Coronavirus: Dossier Lays Out Case Against China Bat Virus Program; Designer Virus

Was the coronavirus designed in a lab? Was it a coincidence that

the Virology Research Lab in Wuhan was working on that very

thing? Actions by the Chinese government suggest a cover-up.

Here are the details; you decide.

Sharri Markson, The Daily Telegraph

China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an “assault on international transparency’’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion.

The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China.

It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government:

covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, 

destroying evidence of it in laboratories and 

refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.

The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province.

Picture: Hector Retamal/AFP

Wuhan Lab studies/modifies coronaviruses

It can also be revealed the Australian government trained and funded a team of Chinese scientists who belong to a laboratory which went on to genetically modify deadly coronaviruses that could be transmitted from bats to humans and had no cure, and is not the subject of a probe into the origins of COVID-19.

As intelligence agencies investigate whether the virus inadvertently leaked from a Wuhan laboratory, the team and its research led by scientist Shi Zhengli feature in the dossier prepared by Western governments that points to several studies they conducted as areas of concern.

It cites their work discovering samples of coronavirus from a cave in the Yunnan province with striking genetic similarity to COVID-19, along with their research synthesising a bat-derived coronavirus that could not be treated.

Its major themes include the “deadly denial of human-to-human transmission”, the silencing or “disappearing” of doctors and scientists who spoke out, the destruction of evidence of the virus from genomic studies laboratories, and “bleaching of wildlife market stalls”, along with the refusal to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine.

Key figures of the Wuhan Institute of Virology team, who feature in the government dossier, were either trained or employed in the CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory where they conducted foundational research on deadly pathogens in live bats, including SARS, as part of an ongoing partnership between the CSIRO and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

CSIRO - The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is an Australian federal government agency responsible for scientific research. CSIRO works with leading organisations around the world.

This partnership continues to this day, according to the website of the Wuhan ­Institute of Virology, despite concerns the research is too risky.

Politicians in the Morrison government are speaking out about the national security and biosecurity concerns of this relationship as the controversial research into bat-related viruses now comes into sharp focus amid the investigation by the Five Eyes intelligence agencies of the United States, Australia, NZ, Canada and the UK.

RISKY BAT RESEARCH

In Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province, not far from the now infamous Wuhan wet market, Dr Shi and her team work in high-protective gear in level-three and level-four bio-containment laboratories studying deadly bat-derived coronaviruses.

At least one of the ­estimated 50 virus samples Dr Shi has in her laboratory is a 96 per cent genetic match to COVID-19. When Dr Shi heard the news about the outbreak of a new ­pneumonia-like virus, she spoke about the sleepless nights she suffered worrying whether it was her lab that was responsible for the outbreak.

As she told Scientific American magazine in an article published this week: “Could they have come from our lab?” Since her initial fears, Dr Shi has satisfied herself the genetic sequence of COVID-19 did not match any her lab was studying.

Yet, given the extent of the People’s Republic of China’s lies, obfuscations and angry refusal to allow any investigation into the origin of the outbreak, her laboratory is now being closely looked at by international intelligence agencies.

The Australian government’s position is that the virus most likely originated in the Wuhan wet market but that there is a remote possibility — a 5 per cent chance — it accidentally leaked from a laboratory.

The US’s position, according to reports this week, is that it is more likely the virus leaked from a laboratory but it could also have come from a wet market that trades and slaughters wild animals, where other diseases including the H5N1 avian flu and SARS originated.

CREATING MORE DEADLY VIRUSES

The Western governments’ research paper confirms this.

It notes a 2013 study conducted by a team of researchers, including Dr Shi, who collected a sample of horseshoe bat faeces from a cave in Yunnan province, China, which was later found to contain a virus 96.2 per cent identical to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19.

The research dossier also references work done by the team to synthesise SARS-like coronaviruses, to analyse whether they could be transmissible from bats to mammals. This means they were altering parts of the virus to test whether it was transmissible to different species.

Their November 2015 study, done in conjunction with the University of North Carolina, concluded that the SARS-like virus could jump directly from bats to humans and there was no treatment that could help.

The study acknowledges the incredible danger of the work they were conducting.

“The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens,” they wrote.

You have to be a scientist to understand it, but below is the line that the governments’ research paper references from the study.

“To examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein — from the RsSHCO14-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats — in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone,” the study states.

One of Dr Shi’s co-authors on that paper, Professor Ralph Baric from North Carolina University, said in an interview with Science Daily at the time: “This virus is highly pathogenic and treatments developed against the original SARS virus in 2002 and the ZMapp drugs used to fight ebola fail to neutralise and control this particular virus.”

A few years later, in March 2019, Dr Shi and her team, including Peng Zhou, who worked in Australia for five years, published a review ­titled Bat Coronaviruses in China in the medical journal Viruses, where they wrote that they “aim to predict virus hot spots and their cross-species transmission potential”, describing it as a matter of “urgency to study bat corona­viruses in China to understand their potential of causing another outbreak. Their review stated: “It is highly likely that future SARS or MERS like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.”

It examined which proteins were “important for interspecies transmission”.

Despite intelligence probes into whether her laboratory may have been responsible for the outbreak, Dr Shi is not hitting pause on her research, which she argues is more important than ever in preventing a pandemic. She plans to head a national project to systemically sample viruses in bat caves, with estimates that there are more than 5000 coronavirus strains “waiting to be discovered in bats globally”.

“Bat-borne coronaviruses will cause more outbreaks,” she told Scientific American. “We must find them before they find us.”

AUSTRALIA’S INVOLVEMENT

Dr Shi, the director of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan Institute of Virology, spent time in Australia as a ­visiting scientist for three months from February 22 to May 21, 2006, where she worked at the CSIRO’s top-level Australian Animal Health Laboratory, which has recently been ­renamed.

The CSIRO would not comment on what work she undertook during her time here, but an archived and translated biography on the Wuhan Institute of Virology website states that she was working with the SARS virus.

“The SARS virus antibodies and genes were tested in the State Key Laboratory of Virology in Wuhan and the Animal Health Research Laboratory in Geelong, Australia,” it states.

The Telegraph has obtained two photographs of her working at the CSIRO laboratories, including in the level-four lab, in 2006.

Shi Zhengli, director of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Academy of
Sciences’ Wuhan Institute of Virology, who worked in Australia in 2006.

Dr Shi’s protégé, Peng Zhou — now the head of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunity Project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — spent three years at the bio-containment facility Australian Animal Health Laboratory between 2011 and 2014. He was sent by China to complete his doctorate at the CSIRO from 2009-2010.

During this time, Dr Zhou arranged for wild-caught bats to be transported alive by air from Queensland to the lab in Victoria where they were euthanised for dissection and studied for deadly viruses.

Dr Linfa Wang, while an Honorary Professor of the Wuhan Institute of Virology between 2005 and 2011, also worked in the CSIRO Office of the Chief Executive Science Leader in Virology between 2008 and 2011.

Federal Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson said it was “very concerning” that Chinese scientists had been conducting research into bat viruses at the CSIRO in Geelong, Victoria, in jointly funded projects between the Australian and Chinese governments.

“We need to exercise extreme care with any research projects involving foreign nationals which may compromise our national security or biosecurity,” she said.

While the US has cut all funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the CSIRO would not respond to ­questions about whether it is still collaborating with it, saying only that it collaborates with research organisations from around the world to prevent diseases.

“As with all partners, CSIRO undertakes due diligence and takes security very seriously,” a spokesman said. “CSIRO undertakes all research in accordance with strict biosecurity and legislative requirements.”

IS THE RESEARCH WORTH THE RISK?

The US withdrew funding from controversial experiments that make pathogens more potent or likely to spread dangerous viruses in October 2014, concerned it could lead to a global pandemic.

The pause on funding for 21 “gain of function” studies was then lifted in December 2017.

Despite the concerns, the CSIRO continued to partner and fund research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The CSIRO refused to respond to questions from The Saturday Telegraph about how much money went into joint research collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Science and its Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Wuhan Institute still lists the CSIRO as a partner while the US has cut ties since the coronavirus outbreak.

The argument is whether it is worth developing these viruses to anticipate and prevent a pandemic when a leak of the virus could also cause one. Debate in the scientific community is heated.

Personally, I think research into such things should be considered a Crime Against Humanity!

Poor Safety Record at Wuhan lab

There have also been serious concerns about a lack of adequate safety practices at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when dealing with deadly viruses.

A ‘‘Sensitive but Unclassified’’ cable, dated January 19, 2018, obtained by The Washington Post, revealed that US embassy scientists and diplomats in Beijing visited the laboratory and sent warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety practices and management weaknesses as it conducted research on coronaviruses from bats.

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of ­appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable stated.

Australian Animal Health Laboratory, in East Geelong, is part of the CSIRO. Picture: Andy Rogers

UNLIKELY CLAIMS VIRUS CREATED IN LAB

Scientific consensus is that the virus came from a wetmarket. But the US’s top spy agency confirmed on the record for the first time yesterday that the US intelligence committee is investigating whether COVID-19 was the result of an accident at a Wuhan laboratory.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence acting director Richard Grenell said the virus was not created in a laboratory.

“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to US policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China,” he said.

“The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified. As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to US national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

LIKELY CLAIMS VIRUS CREATED IN LAB

Despite Mr Grenell’s statement and scientific consensus that the virus was not created in a laboratory, based on its genome sequence the governments’ research paper obtained by The Telegraph notes a study that claims it was created.

South China University of Technology researchers published a study on February 6 that concluded “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high-risk biohazards laboratories”.

“The paper is soon withdrawn because it ‘was not supported by direct proofs’, according to author Botao Xiano,” the dossier noted, continuing to point out that: ‘“No scientists have confirmed or refuted the paper’s findings’, scholar Yanzhong Huang wrote on March 5.”

The Saturday Telegraph does not claim that the South China University of Technology study is credible, only that it has been included in this government research paper produced as part of the case against China.

CHINA’S COVER-UP OF EARLY SAMPLES

The paper obtained by The Saturday Telegraph speaks about “the suppression and destruction of evidence” and points to “virus samples ordered destroyed at genomics labs, wildlife market stalls bleached, the genome sequence not shared publicly, the Shanghai lab closure for ‘rectification’, academic articles subjected to prior review by the Ministry of Science and Technology and data on asymptomatic ‘silent carriers’ kept secret”.

It paints a picture of how the Chinese government deliberately covered up the coronavirus by silencing doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence from the Wuhan laboratory and refusing to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine.

The US, along with other countries, has repeatedly ­demanded a live virus sample from the first batch of coronavirus cases. This is understood to have not been forthcoming despite its vital importance in developing a vaccine while potentially providing an indication of where the virus originated.

THE LAB WORKER WHO DISAPPEARED

Out of all the doctors, activists, journalists and scientists who have reportedly disappeared after speaking out about the coronavirus or criticising the response of Chinese authorities, no case is more intriguing and worrying than that of Huang Yan Ling.

A researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the South China Morning Post reported rumours swirling on Chinese social media that she was the first to be diagnosed with the disease and was ­“patient zero”.

Then came her reported disappearance, with her biography and image deleted from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website.

On February 16 the institute denied she was ­patient zero and said she was alive and well, but there has been no proof of life since then, fanning speculation.

DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE

On December 31, Chinese authorities started censoring news of the virus from search engines, deleting terms including “SARS variation, “Wuhan Seafood market” and “Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.”

On January 1 without any investigation into where the virus originated from, the Wuhan seafood market was closed and disinfected.

It has been reported in the New York Times that individual animals and cages were not swabbed “eliminating evidence of what animal might have been the source of the coronavirus and which people had become infected but survived”. 

The Hubei health commission ordered genomics companies to stop testing for the new virus and to destroy all samples. 

A day later, on January 3, China’s leading health authority, the National Health Commission, ordered Wuhan pneumonia samples be moved to designated testing facilities or destroyed, while instructing a no-publication order related to the unknown disease.

Doctors who bravely spoke out about the new virus were detained and condemned. Their detentions were splashed across the Chinese-state media with a call from Wuhan Police for “all citizens to not fabricate rumours, not spread rumours, not believe rumours.”

A tweet from the Global Times on January 2 states: “Police in Central China’s Wuhan arrested 8 people spreading rumours about local outbreak of unidentifiable #pneumonia. Previous online posts said it was SARS.” This had the intended effect of silencing other doctors who may have been inclined to speak out.

So the truth about the outbreak in China has remained shrouded in secrecy, with President Xi Jinping aggressively rejecting global calls for an inquiry.

The dossier is damning of China’s constant denials about the outbreak.

Human-human transmission

“Despite evidence of human-human transmission from early December, PRC authorities deny it until January 20,” it states.

“The World Health Organisation does the same. Yet officials in Taiwan raised concerns as early as December 31, as did experts in Hong Kong on January 4.”

The paper exposes the hypocrisy of China’s self-­imposed travel bans while condemning those of Australia and the United States, declaring: “Millions of people leave Wuhan after the outbreak and before Beijing locks down the city on January 23.” “Thousands fly overseas. Throughout February, Beijing presses the US, Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbours and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions, even as the PRC imposes severe restrictions at home.” In the paper, the Western governments are pushing back at what they call an “assault on international transparency”.

“As EU diplomats prepare a report on the pandemic, PRC (People's Republic of China) successfully presses Brussels to strike language on PRC disinformation,” it states.

“As Australia calls for an independent inquiry into the pandemic, PRC threatens to cut off trade with Australia. PRC has likewise responded furiously to US calls for transparency.”

Chair of Australia’s Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security Andrew Hastie said after the cover-up and disinformation campaign from China, the world needed transparency and an inquiry.

“So many Australians have been damaged by the mismanagement of COVID-19 by the Chinese government, and if we truly are as close as Beijing suggests we are then we need answers about how this all started,” he said.

KEY DATES IN COVID COVER-UP

November 9, 2015:

Wuhan Institute of Virology publish a study revealing they created a new virus in the lab from SARS-CoV.

December 6, 2019

Five days after a man linked to Wuhan’s seafood market presented pneumonia-like symptoms, his wife contracts it, suggesting human to human transmission.

December 27

China’s health authorities told a novel disease, then affecting some 180 patients, was caused by a new coronavirus.

December 26-30

Evidence of new virus emerges from Wuhan patient data.

December 31

Chinese internet authorities begin censoring terms from social media such as Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.

January 1, 2020

Eight Wuhan doctors who warned about new virus are detained and condemned.

January 3

China’s top health authority issues a gag order.

January 5

Wuhan Municipal Health Commission stops releasing daily updates on new cases. Continues until January 18.

January 10

PRC official Wang Guangfa says outbreak “under control” and mostly a “mild condition”.

January 12

Professor Zhang Yongzhen’s lab in Shanghai is closed by authorities for “rectification”, one day after it shares genomic sequence data with the world for the first time.

January 14

PRC National Health Commission chief Ma Xiaowei privately warns colleagues the virus is likely to develop into a major public health event.

January 24

Officials in Beijing prevent the Wuhan Institute of Virology from sharing sample isolates with the University of Texas.

February 6

China’s internet watchdog tightens controls on social media platforms.

February 9

Citizen-journalist and local businessman Fang Bin disappears.

April 17

Wuhan belatedly raises its official fatalities by 1290.

Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Who Discovered HIV Says Coronavirus Was Created In Lab

Published by  Paul Anthony Taylor 

Dr Rath Foundation

In a highly significant development, Professor Luc Montagnier, the French scientist who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), has added his voice to those who believe the new coronavirus was created in a laboratory. 

Coronavirus could not have arisen naturally

Interviewed on the CNews channel in France, Montagnier asserted that the virus had been designed by molecular biologists. Stating that it contains genetic elements of HIV, he insisted its characteristics could not have arisen naturally.

Asked by the CNews interviewer what the goal of these molecular biologists was, Montagnier said it wasn’t clear. “My job,” he said, “is to expose the facts.” While stressing that he didn’t know who had done it, or why, Montagnier suggested that possibly the goal had been to make an AIDS vaccine. Labeling the virus as “a professional job…a very meticulous job,” he described its genome as being a “clockwork of sequences.”

“There’s a part which is obviously the classic virus, and there’s another mainly coming from the bat, but that part has added sequences, particularly from HIV – the AIDS virus,” he said.

Growing evidence that the virus was ‘designed’

Montagnier also pointed out that he wasn’t the first scientist to assert that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory. Previously, on 31 January 2020, a research group from India had published a paper suggesting that aspects of the virus bore an “uncanny similarity” to HIV. Taken together, the researchers said their findings suggested the virus had an “unconventional evolution” and that further investigation was warranted. While the researchers subsequently retracted their paper, Montagnier said they had been “forced” to do so.

In February 2020, a separate research paper published by scientists from South China University of Technology suggested the virus “probably” came from a laboratory in Wuhan, the city where it was first identified. Significantly, one of the research facilities cited in this paper, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, is said to be the only lab in China that is designated for the study of highly dangerous pathogens such as Ebola and SARS. 

Prior to the opening of this laboratory in 2018, biosafety experts and scientists from the United States had expressed concerns that a virus could escape from it. As with the paper published by the Indian researchers, however, the Chinese scientists’ paper has similarly been withdrawn.

Involvement of the pharma industry

Professor Montagnier has long demonstrated that he is not afraid to challenge the prevailing views of the scientific establishment. Previously, in an interview recorded for the 2009 AIDS documentary ‘House of Numbers’, he had spoken out in favor of nutrition and antioxidants in the fight against HIV/AIDS. As the co-discoverer of HIV and a Nobel prize winner, Montagnier’s statements in this interview gave valuable support to Dr. Rath and other scientists who, for years beforehand, had been warning the world about the pharmaceutical business with the AIDS epidemic.

In a similar way, his assertion today that the coronavirus was designed by molecular biologists raises serious questions about the possible involvement of the pharmaceutical industry. As Montagnier infers, a manmade virus whose genome consists of a “clockwork of sequences” and includes elements of HIV could not have been assembled by amateurs. With estimates of the total global economic cost of the coronavirus varying from $4.1 trillion to $20 trillion or more, the ongoing questions about its origins are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Video 4:30  French with English subtitles