The 2020 disappearance of Ean Higgins

In January 2022 when promoting its upcoming documentary on MH370, Sky News promised that the program would contain a bombshell revelation about the missing Malaysian Airlines plane. As it turned out, the show dropped two bombshells but neither was the one that had been promoted. Compered by Peter Stefanovic, the documentary was concerned with a study of radio wavelengths which claimed to narrow the crash site to a particular zone within the area that had already been searched. The moment that had people like me leaning forward in their seats, however, came when Stefanovic, in little more than a passing comment, said that the Australian MH370 journalist, Ean Higgins, had disappeared and was presumed dead. Then a double blow to the senses: ‘It’s believed there are no suspicious circumstances’.

In his work on MH370 for The Australian, Higgins asked the questions that others shirked. He believed that, if only through a lack of brain power, the Australian leaders were complicit in the cover-up. In the investigation conducted jointly with Malaysia and China, the Australian contingent led by Angus Houston and Tony Abbott saw it as its role to follow instructions and question nothing. It was an approach that was consistent with their aspiration for Australia to be a dutiful international citizen, one for the world to admire. The consequence, however, was an investigation lacking in western characteristics. The search effort refused to look anywhere other than a defined area of the southern Indian Ocean despite evidence of other possibilities, and credible leads from reputable sources were ignored and publicly discredited. Even Australia’s own ocean-search company, GeoResonance, after offering a substantive lead, was denounced worldwide without a hearing. Australia was a party to all of these manoeuvres.

Higgins wanted to know what lay behind this veil of Australian rectitude, and, like several senior aviators including Australia’s Byron Bailey, who continues to advocate, he suspected a strategy of protection of the Muslim world. The investigation, that is, was holding to an assumption that the flight’s final hours were unpiloted and that the plane spiral dived when it ran out of fuel, but evidence already available from the flaperon that had been found indicated that the plane had been piloted down in a mass murder-suicide, with no spiral dive, and that it would therefore have travelled farther south. Higgins believed that further evidence of this mass murder-suicide was being withheld in order to protect Islam, given that the pilot was a Malaysian Muslim. His FOI request was refused and the persistence of his questioning saw him barred from press briefings.

At the same time, Higgins was also suspicious of the role of China. Despite more than half of those lost on MH370 being China’s own people, the government of China had no ‘skin in the game’. The CCP was reluctant to fund the search and did not attend several meetings. There was also the matter of the ship the CCP sent to assist in the search, which made one excuse after another to have to stay in the Port at Fremantle without doing any searching. Higgins reasoned that this ship was spying on Australia’s military whilst in port but his FOI request on this matter was also denied.

Higgins had served as a senior writer and editor for The Australian since 1988. His book, The Hunt for MH370, was published in 2019. He was in the first Sky News documentary on MH370, which aired in February 2020, then he disappeared in June 2020. The last-detected location of his phone, I am told, was at Manly Heads. An inquest before the NSW Coroner is scheduled for 29-31 July 2024.

There was no reporting on his disappearance. Most people only learned of it 21 months later in the second Sky documentary and even since then, next to nothing has been written. Michelle Gunn has told me that his colleagues at The Australian are devastated at what has happened but Higgins’s wife, for family reasons, asked that nothing be reported. The Australian is honouring this request and will wait for the Coroner’s report before writing about Higgins’s life and career. This explains the absence of reporting from Higgins’s own newspaper. Otherwise, however, like so much to do with MH370, the news of the disappearance has been met with an air of silence and secrecy. Even the international Committee for the Protection of Journalists, with its records of those who have been killed or are missing, has no listing for Ean Higgins.  

‘I will continue to investigate MH370, write stories about it in The Australian, and there may be a second edition of this book’, Higgins wrote in his Epilogue, urging people who know more to come forward in order to be on ‘the right side of history, and democracy’. What happened to him to bring these plans to an end?  If it was an MH370 murder, it may not have been the first. On 17 March 2014, as Inmarsat was formulating its assessment that the plane was likely to have flown to the southern Indian Ocean, the company’s satellite controller, Stuart James Fairbairn, died suddenly in his early fifties. Then in 2017 Honourary Malaysian Consul in Madagascar, Houssenaly Zahid Raha, was gunned down soon before he was to hand pieces of MH370 debris to investigators. That debris has not been seen since.

Will matters such as these be taken into account by the Coroner? Will Higgins’s computer, email and phone records be examined? What might those records reveal about MH30 itself?

Or maybe the Coroner will find that Higgins was alone at Manly Heads and took his own life. People I have spoken to who knew him, however, say they saw no indication that he was personally troubled, and, given Higgins’s investigations, such a finding would always be questioned anyway. In this matter of the vanished Boeing 777, anyone who goes after the truth knowingly enters the MH370 twilight zone, where it is not known who or what is around the next corner. As Byron Bailey said to me, ‘If I disappear, I’m telling you now. It’s not suicide’.