Any disappearance is tragic, but when a politician disappears,
a whole new element is introduced — of intrigue, suspicion, and conspiracy.
From fiery activists to legendary statesmen, these are the politicians who are still missing today.
Democratic representative Nick Begich and loud-mouthed Majority Leader Thomas
Hale Boggs were out on a fundraising campaign for Begich in Alaska in 1972.
After taking off from Anchorage in questionable weather conditions,
the plane never made it to its destination in Juneau. More than likely, the small,
two-engined Cessna crashed either in the Gulf of Alaska, or in the deep powder of the Chugach
Mountains. But even after the largest rescue mission in United States history at the time,
which involved 90 aircraft that searched for over a month, the wreckage was never found.
Unsurprisingly, the conspiracy theories came quickly, especially since Boggs was such a
hot shot at the time. Besides having feuded with J. Edgar Hoover over having his phone
bugged by the FBI, Boggs was also on the Warren Commission for the John F. Kennedy assassination,
and he didn't buy into the report that the president was killed by one man.
Some believed Boggs was killed in the plane crash to shut him up, although there's been
no evidence whatsoever to suggest this. Curiously enough, both Boggs and Begich were
reelected to the House of Representatives even after they were presumed dead.
"It is feared that the prime minister has drowned.
A great search is being made for Mr. Holt off Portsea Victoria."
Harold Holt became the prime minister of Australia less than two years before
his disappearance in 1967. Holt vanished into Australian waters on December 17th 1967 after
he and a group of friends had gone for a Sunday stroll along the scenic sands of Portsea Victoria.
While the others stayed on land, Holt swam farther and farther out into the Bass Strait.
Within an hour, the largest search and rescue mission in the country's history was underway.
Two days later, the 59-year-old prime minister was declared dead.
Although his disappearance seemed straightforward enough,
the Aussie people needed a better story than just a mere drowning.
According to a police record from one of the friends who watched Holt vanish that day:
"She saw the water become very turbulent around him very suddenly and appeared to
boil and these conditions seemed to 'swamp on him.'"
This naturally struck up a number of imaginative theories, one of which seemed to spur out of
Holt's work to accept Asian immigrants into a very-segregated Australia. Anthony Grey,
a British journalist for Reuters, even published The Prime Minister Was a Spy in 1983,
which deduced that Holt was a Chinese spy and boarded a submarine after he finished
a mission for the Communist government. Hey, you wanted conspiracy theories, didn't you?
It was an August evening in 1930 when a New York supreme justice hailed a cab outside a chophouse
to attend a Broadway show. He was dressed to the nines in a brown suit topped with a panama hat,
per usual, and had just had dinner and drinks with a lawyer pal and a show girl.
This seemed like a typical night for Joseph Force Crater, but earlier that day he was obviously in
something of a pickle — as he had destroyed and rearranged a number of legal documents.
He had also requested large withdrawals from his bank that are equivalent to more than $79,000
in 2021. One might wonder whether Crater was preparing to run, but
from what isn't not known… since he disappeared that very night.
Crater was a member of the prominent New York political organization known as The
Tammany Club, which some believe may have had something to do with his disappearance.
Crater had been elected to the Supreme Court by Franklin D. Roosevelt only four
months after becoming a judge. But this came as a surprise to the powers of Tammany Hall,
who already had their own pick ready to go. Rumor quickly spread that Crater had known
about some guys buying seats on the bench from Tammany, and that's when things fell apart.
Sadly, the truth behind Crater's disappearance is unlikely to ever come to light.
In July 2016, Ervin Ibragimov was stopped in the middle of the road,
pulled from his vehicle, and dragged into another by men dressed in police uniforms.
The abducted 30-year-old was a member of the Bakhchysarai Municipal Council
and a senior specialist for interethnic relations in Crimea — the region Russia now occupies,
having annexed it from Ukraine in 2014. Ibragimov had been outspoken about Russia's occupation
in Crimea, and his statements evidently didn't go unnoticed by Russian officials.
Before the incident on the bypass near his home, Ibragimov had been warned
about voicing his opinions of Crimean rights, and was followed on occasion,
too. Despite surveillance footage of the kidnapping, and his father having the
license plate number of the vehicle that took him, Ibragimov's disappearance has
yet to be investigated with evident intent by the Russian administration in Crimea.
If you're familiar with Hunter S. Thompson's iconic novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
or the movie it inspired, then you've actually met Oscar Acosta before. This is the guy who
inspired the outrageous Samoan attorney known in the half-true, half-fictional novel as Dr. Gonzo.
"As your attorney, I advise you to rent a very fast car with no top.
And you'll need the cocaine."
Like the character he inspired, Acosta was a fiery outspoken lawyer — but he was also
a political activist and imaginative writer. In the late '60s, Acosta became involved with
the Chicano Civil Rights movement in Los Angeles, and it was around that time that he met Thompson.
A few years later, the pair embarked on their now-legendary trip to Las Vegas.
Acosta was addicted to psychedelics and amphetamines, likely due to his battles
with mental illness, leading to the insatiable party habits that made he and Thompson famous.
He also wrote a couple books himself in the early 70s, including The Autobiography of
Buffalo Brown and The Revolt of the Cockroach People. In 1974, when it began to look like the
latter book was going to be a dud, Acosta took off to Mexico. The last person who
heard from him was his son, who said he was "about to board a boat full of white snow."
Most people assume that it was the folks he joined on the boat who killed Acosta. Given his
wild and unpredictable temperament, it probably didn't come as too much of a surprise, either.
Seham Sergiwa was a member of the Libyan parliament who was kidnapped from her home
in Benghazi in 2019. The night before, she had denounced the commander of the Libya National
Army on live television for his military campaign in Tripoli. Sergiwa's abductors shot her husband
in the leg and beat her son as they violently detained Sergiwa in front of them. She was never
seen again, and it's presumed by sources and her family that she was executed the same day.
Benghazi's interior ministry sent out a statement that the LNA had nothing to do
with Sergiwa's kidnapping, which seems like a logical go-to for anyone who's been accused of
a malicious crime they don't want to deal with. But her family strongly believes otherwise,
due to a message that was spray painted outside of their home, which read "don't cross the line
of the army." Sergiwa was just one of many political women who have been targeted,
kidnapped, and killed in Libya, and some believe her forced disappearance may have
been part of a wider attempt to keep women out of the country's government.
Wanchalearm Satsaksit was a widely popular satirist and activist from Thailand,
who loudly criticized his country's government for their restrictions around homosexuality and gender
rights. He later joined the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, hoping to battle
against Thailand's perpetual anti-democratic military coups. In 2014, after another coup
and subsequent protest, Satsaksit was summoned to a meeting at a military base. He politely
declined by fleeing to Cambodia and living in exile — until his public abduction in June 2020.
The day prior to the incident, Satsaksit had ridiculed the army chief-turned-prime minister
Prayuth Chan-ocha in a Facebook video. The next day, while he was half-way through a
phone conversation with his sister, a Toyota Highlander pulled up beside him. A number of
armed men then bundled Satsaksit into the vehicle. As he screamed for help, bystanders approaching
the gunmen were told to stay back, before the gunmen drove away. Still on the line, his sister
heard her brother repeatedly say he couldn't breathe, and, after 30 minutes, the call ended.
Satsaksit is believed to have been targeted by a collaboration between
Asia's dictatorships, established to help capture and extract various exiles.
His sister and fellow activists have sought justice, only to be
told by the Thai government that they had no involvement in the abduction.
"I come here today as we who share the same religion. We wish to know the whereabouts
of Wanchalearm. We also come here to find justice from the judiciary of Cambodia."
Further investigations have come up empty,
despite the existence of clear video footage and a number of eyewitness reports.
Ilias Ali was a Bangladeshi lawmaker and secretary of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party,
who went missing with his driver in April 2012. Some believed Ali was detained by
law enforcement, who subsequently denied any involvement with the disappearance.
There was also speculation that the opposing party, the Awami League,
possibly had something to do with it. Soon after, however, a committee member of the
BNP claimed that Ali was not taken by outside institutions, but by his own allies in the party.
Mirza Abbas said that, the night before Ali went missing,
he had argued with a fellow party member. In a party meeting, Abbas alleged:
"I got the information around 2:30am on that night when Ilias disappeared. I immediately contacted
the officials I knew, and they informed me that he was being taken to Chattogram."
Abbas also claimed that those involved with Ali's disappearance are still working within the BNP.
The motive behind the abduction, however, remains a total mystery.
Norodom Kantol served as the prime minister of Cambodia from 1962 to 1966.
He also acted as foreign minister for his cousin Norodom Sihanouk — the wiley
and charismatic king of Cambodia who was ousted during the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, a communist regime known as the Khmer Rouge had been burgeoning in the country for
years. The Khmer Rouge quickly moved to ally themselves with Sihanouk, since he was popular
with Cambodia's urban population, whose support the group needed to enact their national takeover.
After a long and bloody civil war, the Khmer Rouge emerged victorious.
The regime then imprisoned the royal family, including Kantol, who went missing in 1976 after
the Khmer Rouge's leader, Pol Pot, took up the throne. Kantol is presumed to have been killed
by Cambodia's new regime, who went on to kickstart an era of genocide, slavery, and mass starvation.
This lasted right up until 1979, when Vietnam stepped in to help the Cambodians remove Pol
Pot and his monstrous regime. Sihanouk, meanwhile, returned to the throne in 1993,
and enjoyed an on-again-off-again career as a musician and filmmaker.
Viktar Hanchar wore plenty of hats during his largely successful political career,
including prime minister of Belarus and chairman of the Central Commission for
Elections. Hanchar famously blocked President Alexander Lukashenko from
amending the constitution to elongate his presidential term.
And since Hanchar had previously worked for Lukashenko's campaign in 1994, this
really rubbed the president the wrong way. So he fired Hanchar from his position; however, Hanchar
went on to form a protest election committee during the 1999 election against Lukashenko.
In September 1999, Hanchar went missing in Minsk with his business partner, who had helped finance
the opposition against Lukashenko. The two had gone to a bathhouse that night and reportedly
crashed Hanchar's Jeep Cherokee shortly after leaving. Hanchar's blood was found at the scene,
and it was pretty obvious that the men had been abducted. Because the investigation
didn't begin until a few years after they went missing, many suspected that Lukashenko and
his operatives were to blame for Hanchar's disappearance — and presumably his death.
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