Suspicious death of two FBI agents creates controversy
The FBI said in a statement that 41-year-old Christopher Lorek and 40-year-old Stephen Shaw were killed on May 17 as they fell out of a helicopter into water during a training mission off the coast of Virginia Beach.
US officials have blamed bad weather for the tragedy but some have questioned the credibility of the official account, considering it a cover-up.
They say the agents’ death adds to the suspicious death of a friend of the Boston bombing suspect, Ibragim Todashev, who was killed in his own apartment by an FBI agent.
Lorek and Shaw were part of the bureau's Critical Incident Response Group and were both members of the team investigating the Boston Marathon bombings in mid-April.
“You could always take it as one of an endless group of coincidences. We have so many [of them], when you look at the Boston investigation that these two individuals were involved in, everything had the stamp of CIA and FBI on it, from the first steps,” Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, told Press TV.
“What we have in the US is that we don’t report, we don’t have the least free press here. There are powerful dissident elements within our military, intelligence services and government that are under the control of... I’ll call them organized crime on a worldwide basis. If you refer to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of narcotics and trillions of dollars worth of financial crimes, it is simply organized crime, it is the understatement of all time,” he added.
The incident has reminded many of the dramatic death of top US commandos in Afghanistan, who lost their lives three months after their involvement in the alleged killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011.
On August 6, 2011, the helicopter of the Navy SEAL Team VI was shot down in Afghanistan.
The families of Navy SEAL members have blamed the government for the tragedy, saying the shooting down of the helicopter and the subsequent cover-up was planned by the government.
They said that US President Barack Obama turned the SEALs group into a Taliban target after the administration revealed they had conducted the bin Laden raid.
The families also claimed Taliban militants had received leaked information from the US government regarding the landing site of the commandos’ helicopter.
Moreover, the SEAL Team VI members were reportedly flown to the landing site with a Vietnam-era Chinook helicopter rather than with their customary Special Forces choppers.
“There is absolutely nothing that is credible about that; this is not a mission they would have been on, this is not a helicopter they would have been on,” Duff pointed out.
