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| A Chinese relative of passengers aboard a missing Malaysia Airlines plane, center, cries as she is escorted by a woman while leaving a hotel room for relatives or friends of passengers aboard the missing airplane, in Beijing, China Sunday, March 9, 2014. Planes and ships from across Asia resumed the hunt Sunday for the Malaysian jetliner missing with 239 people on board for more than 24 hours, while Malaysian aviation authorities investigated how two passengers were apparently able to get on the aircraft using stolen passports. |
KUALA LUMPUR,
Malaysia (AP) -- Vietnamese aircraft spotted what they suspected was
one of the doors of a missing Boeing 777 on Sunday, while troubling
questions emerged about how two passengers managed to board the
ill-fated aircraft using stolen passports.
Interpol
confirmed it knew about the stolen passports but said no authorities
checked its vast databases on stolen documents before the Boeing
jetliner departed Saturday from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing with
239 people on board.
Warning "only a handful
of countries" routinely make such checks, Interpol secretary general
Ronald Noble chided authorities for "waiting for a tragedy to put
prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates."
More
than two days after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing, the
final minutes before its disappearance remained a mystery. The plane
lost contact with ground controllers somewhere between Malaysia and
Vietnam.
However, searchers in a low-flying
plane spotted an object that appeared to be one of the plane's doors,
the state-run Thanh Nien newspaper said, citing the deputy chief of
staff of Vietnam's army, Lt. Gen. Vo Van Tuan.
Two
ships from the maritime police were headed to the site about 60 miles
(90 kilometers) south of Tho Chu island in the Gulf of Thailand, the
same area where oil slicks were spotted Saturday.
"From this object, hopefully (we) will find the missing plane," Tuan said.
The
missing jetliner apparently fell from the sky at cruising altitude in
fine weather, and the pilots were either unable or had no time to send a
distress signal - unusual circumstances under which a modern jetliner
operated by a professional airline would crash.
Authorities
were checking on the identities of the two passengers who boarded the
plane with stolen passports. On Saturday, the foreign ministries in
Italy and Austria said the names of two citizens listed on the flight's
manifest matched the names on two passports reported stolen in Thailand.
"I
can confirm that we have the visuals of these two people on CCTV,"
Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news
conference late Sunday, adding that the footage was being examined. "We
have intelligence agencies, both local and international, on board."
The
thefts of the two passports - one belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel
and the other to Luigi Maraldi of Italy - were entered into Interpol's
database after they were stolen in Thailand in 2012 and last year, the
police body said. But no authorities in Malaysia or elsewhere checked
the passports against the database of 40 million stolen or lost travel
documents before the Malaysian Airlines plane took off.
In
a forceful statement, the Interpol chief, who has called passport fraud
one of the world's greatest threats, said he hoped "that governments
and airlines worldwide will learn from the tragedy."
"Now,
we have a real case where the world is speculating whether the stolen
passport holders were terrorists," Noble said. "Interpol is asking why
only a handful of countries worldwide are taking care to make sure that
persons possessing stolen passports are not boarding international
flights."
Troubling details also emerged Sunday about the itineraries of the two passengers traveling on the stolen passports.
A
telephone operator on a China-based KLM hotline confirmed Sunday that
passengers named Maraldi and Kozel had been booked on one-way tickets on
the same KLM flight, flying from Beijing to Amsterdam on Saturday.
Maraldi was to fly on to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Kozel to Frankfurt,
Germany.
She said the pair booked the tickets through China Southern Airlines, but she had no information on where they bought them.
As holders of EU passports with onward flights to Europe, the passengers would not have needed visas for China.
Interpol
said it and national investigators were working to determine the true
identities of those who used the stolen passports to board the Malaysia
Airlines flight. White House Deputy National Security Adviser Tony
Blinken said the U.S. was looking into the stolen passports, but that
investigators had reached no conclusions.
Interpol
has long sounded the alarm that growing international travel has
underpinned a new market for identity theft: Bogus passports have lured
illegal immigrants, terrorists, drug runners, pretty much anyone looking
to travel unnoticed. More than 1 billion times last year, travelers
boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol's
database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, the police
agency said.
In addition to the plane's sudden
disappearance, which experts said was consistent with a possible
onboard explosion, the stolen passports strengthened concerns about
terrorism as a possible cause. Al-Qaida militants have used similar
tactics to try to disguise their identities.
Still,
other possible causes included a catastrophic failure of the plane's
engines, extreme turbulence, or pilot error or even suicide.
Establishing what happened with any certainty will need data from flight
recorders and a detailed examination of any debris, something that will
take months if not years.
Malaysia's air
force chief, Rodzali Daud, said radar indicated that before it
disappeared, the plane may have turned back, but there were no further
details on which direction it went or how far it veered off course.
"We
are trying to make sense of this," Daud said at a news conference. "The
military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back,
and in some parts this was corroborated by civilian radar."
Malaysia
Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said pilots are supposed
to inform the airline and traffic control authorities if the plane does a
U-turn. "From what we have, there was no such distress signal or
distress call per se, so we are equally puzzled," he said.
A
total of 34 aircraft and 40 ships from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand,
Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and the United States were
deployed to the area where ground controllers lost contact with the
plane, the maritime border between Malaysia and Vietnam.
Of
the 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board, two-thirds were
Chinese, while the rest were from elsewhere in Asia, Europe and North
America, including three Americans.
Family
members of Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive who was on board the
plane, said they saw him a week ago when he visited them in Texas after
relocating to Kuala Lumpur from Beijing, where he had worked for two
years.
"There is a shock, a very surreal
moment in your life," said Wood's brother, James Wood. "With a situation
like this, when a plane just disappears ... it leaves you with a lot of
questions."
The other two Americans were
identified on the passenger manifest as 4-year-old Nicole Meng and
2-year-old Yan Zhang. It was not known with whom they were traveling.
After
more than 30 hours without contact with the aircraft, Malaysia Airlines
told family members they should "prepare themselves for the worst,"
Hugh Dunleavy, the commercial director for the airline, told reporters.
Finding
traces of an aircraft that disappears over sea can take days or longer,
even with a sustained search effort. Depending on the circumstances of
the crash, wreckage can be scattered over many square kilometers
(miles). If the plane enters the water before breaking up, there can be
relatively little debris.
A team of American
experts was en route to Asia to be ready to assist in the investigation
into the crash. The team includes accident investigators from the
National Transportation Safety Board, as well as technical experts from
the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing, the safety board said in
a statement.
Malaysia Airlines has a good
safety record, as does the 777, which had not had a fatal crash in its
19-year history until an Asiana Airlines plane crashed last July in San
Francisco, killing three passengers, all Chinese teenagers.
