- Passport Theft Adds to Mystery of Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet
By
early Sunday morning, there was little to go on: no wreckage of the
jet, a Boeing 777-200 with 239 people aboard, and other than oil slicks
on the surface of the Gulf of Thailand that may have been from a crash,
no clue that an accident had even taken place. The airline said the
plane, which departed from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, had
recently passed inspection, and Malaysia’s deputy minister of transport,
Aziz bin Kaprawi, said the authorities had not received any distress
signals from the aircraft. The plane was flying at 35,000 feet with no
reports of threatening weather when it last made contact.
After
officials in Rome and Vienna confirmed that the names of an Italian and
an Austrian on the manifest of the missing flight matched the names on
two passports reported stolen in Thailand, officials emphasized that the
investigation was in its earliest stages and that they were considering
all possibilities, including terrorism.
“We
are not ruling out anything,” the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines,
Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, told reporters at Kuala Lumpur International
Airport on Saturday night. “As far as we are concerned right now, it’s
just a report.”
Using
a system that looks for flashes around the world, the Pentagon reviewed
preliminary surveillance data from the area where the plane disappeared
and saw no evidence of an explosion, said an American government
official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the subject
matter was classified. A team of aviation experts led by the National
Transportation Safety Board was on its way to the area.
If
all aboard were killed, it would be the deadliest commercial airline
accident since Nov. 12, 2001, when an American Airlines Airbus crashed
just after takeoff from Kennedy Airport en route to the Dominican
Republic.
A
senior American intelligence official said law enforcement and
intelligence agencies were investigating the issue of the stolen
passports. The American authorities were scrutinizing the flight
manifest closely, the official said, noting that forged travel documents
are also used routinely by smugglers and illegal immigrants.
“At
this time, we have not identified this as an act of terrorism,” said
the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity Saturday because
of the continuing inquiry. “While the stolen passports are interesting,
they don’t necessarily say to us that this was a terrorism act.”
A
European counterterrorism official said the Italian man whose passport
was stolen, Luigi Maraldi, 37, called his parents from Thailand, where
he was vacationing, after discovering that someone by the same name was
listed on the passenger manifest. The official, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity, said Mr. Maraldi reported the theft last August
to the Italian police. The official said the passport of the Austrian
man, Christian Kozel, 30, who is currently in Austria, was stolen about
two years ago.
The
European official said that he was surprised it had been possible to
check in with stolen passports at the Kuala Lumpur airport and that an
alert should have popped up on the airline agent’s computer.
Security
experts in Asia said the use of false travel documents was a growing
problem in the region, but they differed on the significance of the two
stolen passports to the investigation.
“My
guess is that illegal migration is also a possibility,” said Xu Ke, a
lecturer at the Zhejiang Police College in eastern China who studies
aviation safety and hijackings and has advised the Chinese authorities.
“There are many cases of falsified and counterfeit passports and visas
for illegal migration that our public security comes across, even
several cases every day.”
But
Steve Vickers, the chief executive of a Hong Kong-based security
consulting company that specializes in risk mitigation and corporate
intelligence in Asia, said the presence of multiple travelers on stolen
passports aboard a single jet was rare and a potential clue.
“It
is fairly unusual to have more than one person flying on a flight with a
stolen passport,” said Mr. Vickers, who publicly warned a month ago
that stolen airport passes and other identity documents in Asia merited a
crackdown. “The future of this investigation lies in who really checked
in and what they looked like,” he added.
Azharuddin
Abdul Rahman, the director general of Malaysia’s Department of Civil
Aviation, said investigators were already reviewing video footage of the
passengers. “There are only two passengers on record that flew on this
aircraft that had false passports,” he said. “And we have the CCTV
recordings of those passengers from check-in bags to the departure
point.”
Malaysian
officials also said Sunday that investigators had noted that five
ticketed passengers failed to board the flight. Their luggage was
removed from the plane before it departed, the authorities said.
Operating
as Flight MH370, the plane left Kuala Lumpur just after midnight,
headed for Beijing. Air traffic control in Subang, a suburb of Kuala
Lumpur, lost contact with the plane around 1:30 a.m. on Saturday,
Malaysia’s civil aviation department said.
China
Central Television said that according to Chinese air traffic control
officials, the aircraft never entered Chinese airspace.
At
a news conference in Beijing after the arrival of a team of employees
to assist families of the passengers in China, an official of Malaysia
Airlines said the missing plane had no history of malfunctions. “It was
last inspected 10 days ago, well before scheduled service,” said the
executive, Ignatius Ong. “It was all in top condition.”
When
pressed about possible security lapses, he repeated several times that
the airline had no confirmation from the Malaysian authorities that
passengers had boarded with stolen passports.
Malaysia,
the United States and Vietnam dispatched ships and aircraft to the
mouth of the Gulf of Thailand on Saturday to join an intensive search,
and the state-run Xinhua news agency said China was sending a Coast
Guard vessel and two naval ships. The Chinese Ministry of Transport said
a team of scuba divers who specialize in emergency rescues and recovery
had been assembled on Hainan, the southern island-province, to prepare
to go on Sunday to the area where the airliner may have gone down.
Lai
Xuan Thanh, the director of the Civil Aviation Administration of
Vietnam, said on Saturday that a Vietnamese Navy AN26 aircraft had
discovered oil on the surface of the water toward the Vietnam side of
the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand, east of the Malaysian Peninsula. The
oil is suspected to have come from the missing plane, he added.
But
on Sunday, Malaysia’s defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, added a
confusing twist, saying the plane might have gone down west of the
Malaysian Peninsula. “We are looking at the possibility of an aircraft
air turnback,” he said without elaborating whether the plane might have
changed course for mechanical reasons or a hijacking, or why the
authorities suspected the plane might have reversed course.
Malaysia
Airlines said the plane had 227 passengers aboard, including two
toddlers, and an all-Malaysian crew of 12. According to the manifest,
the passengers included 154 citizens of China or Taiwan, 38 Malaysians,
seven Indonesians, six Australians, five Indians, four French and three
Americans, as well as two citizens each from Canada, New Zealand and
Ukraine and one each from Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Russia —
although the true nationalities of the passengers carrying the Austrian
and Italian passports are still unknown.
The
family of one of the Americans aboard the flight, Philip Wood, an IBM
employee in Kuala Lumpur, said they had little information beyond what
had been reported in the news media.
“We’re relying on our Lord,” Mr. Wood’s father, Aubrey, said from his home in Keller, Tex. “He’s the one who carries the load.”
The
tickets to the holders of the stolen Austrian and Italian passports
were sold by China Southern Airlines, which has a code share agreement
with Malaysia Airlines, according to China Southern’s account on Sina
Weibo, the Chinese microblog platform. China Southern said it sold five
other tickets to the flight: to a Dutch passenger, two Ukrainians, and
one Malaysian and one Chinese passenger.
Arnold
Barnett, a longtime Massachusetts Institute of Technology specialist in
aviation safety statistics, said that before the disappearance of the
plane, Malaysia Airlines had suffered two fatal crashes, in 1977 and
1995. Based on his estimate that Malaysia Airlines operates roughly
120,000 flights a year, he calculated that the airline’s safety record
was consistent with that of airlines in other fairly prosperous,
middle-income countries but had not yet reached the better safety record
of airlines based in the world’s richest countries.
Malaysia
has not been targeted in terrorist attacks in recent decades, although
the 1977 crash was attributed to a hijacking. But some of the planning
for the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States was done in Malaysia,
which has a relatively lax visa policy. The country is a major trading
nation and a natural meeting place for a variety of groups involved in
illicit activities.
The
plane’s disappearance came at the end of the annual National People’s
Congress in Beijing, and took place at a time of rising concern in China
about terrorism. Mr. Ahmad Jauhari of Malaysia Airlines said early on
in a statement that there was speculation that the plane had landed
safely somewhere along the route to Beijing. But in a telephone
interview before reporting the sighting of the oil in the ocean, Mr.
Thanh expressed concern about the aircraft’s fate.
“The possibility of an accident is high,” he said.
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