Saga of missing flight MH370 continues to pose more questions
Two weeks after its disappearance, there are more twists to come in the mystery of MH370
If - and it's a big if - the latest images from a Chinese satellite turn out to be wreckage from flight MH370, it won't mark the end of the mystery, just a cruel new twist to a story which has been short on facts and long on theories.
That a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER aircraft bound for Beijing with 239 people on board vanished from sight over the South China Sea in the early hours of March 8 is indisputable. But the absence of facts has left a void readily filled with rumour, claim and wild speculation.
It seems inconceivable in a world which boasts satellites capable of reading vehicle license plates that a passenger jet can simply disappear.
In what has often seemed a desperate and confused search for the truth, every passenger, crew member and person with a direct connection to the flight has come under scrutiny, spawning an abundance of theories, from the wildly conspiratorial political revenge hijacking and mistaken shooting down of the plane, to the obvious terrorist outrage explanation and the more prosaic technical malfunction.
In fact, much of the last 15 days has been more about debunking theories and correcting misinformation than the production of cold, hard, facts.
Following the early disclosure that two passengers used stolen passports to board the plane, officials suspected a terrorist attack until the two Iranian men were found to have no known terror links. The two Iranians were most likely illegal immigrants.
Not long after Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that new evidence of the airliner's movements pointed to a deliberate diversion of the plane, authorities raided the homes of 53-year-old captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and 27-year-old first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid and seized a flight simulator that Zaharie built which contained files of landing locations in the Indian Ocean.