HONG KONG - Investigators trying to find out Saturday what happened to a Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand were examining the usual causes of plane crashes: mechanical failure, pilot error and bad weather. But after learning that two of the passengers possessed stolen passports, the possibility of foul play entered the equation.
As of Saturday night, there was little for investigators to go on other than two oil slicks on the surface of the water, each between 6 miles and 9 miles long. There was no sign of wreckage of the Boeing 777-200 that was carrying 239 people. Officials lost radio contact with the plane about 1:30 a.m. Saturday.
Azhaddin Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s deputy civil aviation authority chief, said the air search, suspended for the night, resumed today, in addition to a sea search that continued through the darkness.
The airline said the plane had recently passed inspection, and Malaysia’s deputy minister of transport, Azizbin Kaprawi, said the authorities had not received any distress signals from the aircraft. The plane was flying at 35,000 feet in an area of the world where it would not have been expected to encounter threatening weather.
After officials in Rome and Vienna confirmed that the names of an Italian and an Austrian listed 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.
“We are not ruling out anything,” the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said Saturday night at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. “As far as we are concerned right now, it’s just a report.”
A senior U.S. intelligence official said law enforcement and intelligence agencies were investigating the matter. But they had no leads late Saturday.
“At this time, we have not identified this as an act of terrorism,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing inquiry. “While the stolen passports are interesting, they don’t necessarily say to us that this was a terrorism act.”
Asked whether terrorism was suspected, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said authorities were “looking at all possibilities, but it is too early to make any conclusive remarks.”
Operating as Flight MH370, the plane left Kuala Lumpur just after midnight Friday, headed for Beijing. Air traffic control in Subang, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, lost contact with the plane at 2:40 a.m. Saturday, airline officials said.
That timeline seemed to suggest that the plane stayed in the air for two hours - long enough to fly not only across the Gulf of Thailand but also far north across Vietnam. But Fredrik Lindahl, the chief executive of Flightradar24, an online aircraft-tracking service, said the last radar contact had been at 1:19 a.m., less than 40 minutes after the flight began.
Lai Xuan Thanh, director of Vietnam’s civil aviation authority, said air traffic control in that country never made contact with the plane.
A Malaysia Airlines spokesman said Saturday evening that the last conversation between the flight crew and air traffic control in Malaysia had been about 1:30 a.m., but he reiterated that the plane had not disappeared from air traffic control systems in Subang until 2:40 a.m. China Central Television said that according to Chinese air traffic control officials, the aircraft never entered Chinese airspace.
A European counter terrorism official said an Italian man, Luigi Maraldi, 37, had called his parents from Thailand, where he is vacationing, after discovering that his name was listed on the plane’s passenger manifest.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Maraldi’s passport was stolen in August, and he reported the theft to the Italian police. The counter terrorism official said the passport of an Austrian man, Christian Kozel, 30, was stolen about two years ago. His name was also on the plane’s passenger manifest.
Malaysia, the United States and Vietnam dispatched ships and aircraft to the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand on Saturday to join the intensive search for the aircraft, and China said it had sent a coast guard ship that was to arrive this afternoon.
Malaysia had sent 15 planes and nine ships to the area, Najib said.
The U.S. Navy said a warship is among American vessels moving to join in the search. The USS Pinckney, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, was on its way from international waters in the South China Sea to the southern coast of Vietnam.
The Pinckney carries two helicopters that can be used for search and rescue. It was expected to reach the search area within 24 hours.
Additionally, the Navy is deploying an Orion patrol and surveillance plane based in Okinawa. It will provide long-range search, radar and communications capabilities in the search.
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 today to the area where the airliner may have gone down.
Boeing said in a statement that it was assembling a team of technical experts to advise the national authorities investigating the disappearance of the aircraft.
Thanh said a Vietnamese navy AN26 aircraft had discovered the oil slicks toward the Vietnam side of the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand. The oil slicks are suspected to have come from the missing plane, he added.
As of this morning Vietnamese ships and planes hunting for the jetliner have found no wreckage close to where the two oil slicks were spotted, but the search was continuing.
Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, reported that the Chinese prime minister, Li Keqiang, had called his Malaysian counterpart, Najib, telling him, “The urgent task now is to quickly clarify the situation and use a range of means to enhance the intensity of search and rescue.”
Malaysia Airlines said the plane had 227 passengers aboard, including two infants, and an all-Malaysian crew of 12. The passengers included 154 citizens from 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.
In the United States, a friend confirmed that an IBM executive from North Texas named Philip Wood had been aboard the jet. And an Austin, Texas, technology company known as Freescale Semiconductor confirmed that it had 20 employees from Malaysia and China on the flight.
Information for this article was contributed by Keith Bradsher, Eric Schmitt,Thomas Fuller, Chau Doan, Amy Qin, Chris Buckley and Alison Smale of The New York Times; and by Chris Brummitt, Eileen Ng, Didi Tang, Aritz Parra, Stephen Wright, Colleen Barry, George Jahn, Jim Gomez, Oliver Teves, Joan Lowy, Scott Mayerowitz and staff members of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/09/2014