Also, this COULD HAVE been a low yield explosive that tore a hole in the side of the aircraft which would give enough time for an error code to be transmitted. This could have been a bomb, not JUST a ‘mechanical fire’.
^^^^^ This. All the smoke alerts only 3 seconds apart and then no mayday. It happened awfully fast for it to be mechanical in nature.
I think that’s the bottom line here. It all happened too fast for it NOT to be a bomb. You would get early warnings for a purely mechanical malfunction and things would play out a bit slower.