People’s instinctive reaction to the hijack: fake and staged

Jacob Borg, who is a journalist with the Times of Malta, can’t say outright what almost everyone I’ve heard commenting about it has said: that they don’t quite know why, but they get the feeling the whole thing was a set-up.

Of course, the dead give-aways are the fact that the weapons were not weapons at all, but replicas, and that all the passengers were allowed off before negotiations began, which means that the hijackers are the only ones on the planet to voluntarily relinquish all the hostages they need as a leverage.

And then the hostages walked off looking super-cool and relaxed after their terrifying experience.

I’m trying to imagine how that would work. Scene: a brainstorming meeting at the Office of the Prime Minister, with a view to repairing some of the damage caused to the Prime Minister’s image by yet more scandals. Somebody suggests an organ donor card, and somebody else says: “Why don’t we stage a hijack using some of Keith Schembri’s and John Dalli’s old contacts in Libya? We’ll get a lot of cooperation from Afriqiyah Airways.”

And somebody else says: “Isn’t John Dalli a little too elderly for something like that?”