KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - A Vietnamese official said searchers on ships worked throughout the night but could not find a rectangular object spotted Sunday afternoon that was thought to be one of the doors of a missing Boeing 777.
Doan Huu Gia, the chief of Vietnam’s search and rescue coordination center, said today that six planes and seven ships from Vietnam were searching for the object but nothing had been found.
Vietnamese aircraft spotted what they suspected was one of the doors of the 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 Lumpuren 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.”
“This is a situation we had hoped never to see,” he said.
More than two days after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared, the final minutes before it was lost remained a mystery. The plane lost contact with ground controllers somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam.
Aircraft and boats from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam scoured the area where ground controllers lost contact with the plane, the maritime border between Malaysia and Vietnam.
On Sunday afternoon, 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 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.
Malaysia Airlines confirmed that the missing aircraft had been involved in a collision with another plane in 2012 at the Shanghai airport that resulted in damage to the Malaysian aircraft’s wingtip. But the airline said the wing was repaired by Boeing and declared safe to fly.
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.
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, the Malaysian civil aviation chief, said investigators were reviewing video footage of the passengers in question.
“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.”
He declined to provide details about what investigators saw in the footage.
“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 theother 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 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.
A senior U.S. law enforcement official confirmed Sunday that Thai officials were investigating a “passport ring” operating on the resort island of Phuket, where both passports were stolen.
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, and 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, 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.
Still, other possible causes included a catastrophic failure of the plane’s engines, extreme turbulence, pilot error or even suicide. Establishing what happened with any certainty will require 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.
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.
As of this morning, Malaysia Airlines has not yet eliminated MH370 from its list of usable flight numbers. The airline is still selling tickets on its website for that flight to Beijing on Wednesday morning, with departure at 12:35 a.m. and scheduled arrival at 6:30 a.m.
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.
Twenty employees of an Austin, Texas-based technology company on board the missing flight were en route to a business meeting in China, a spokesman for the tech firm said Sunday.
The employees - 12 from Malaysia and eight from China - work at facilities in their respective countries that manufacture semiconductor chips, said Freescale Semiconductor spokesman Jacey Zuniga.
Family members of Philip Wood, 50, an 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.”
Wood’s brother said the family is leaning on their faith as they wait for news.
“My brother, our family, we are Christians. Christ above else is what’s keeping us together,” he said.
The other two Americans were identified on the passenger manifest as Nicole Meng, 4, and Yan Zhang, 2. 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 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. 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.
Information for this article was contributed by Chris Brummitt, Eileen Ng, Rod McGuirk, Didi Tang, Gillian Wong, Louise Watt, Joan Lowy, Scott Mayerowitz and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Thomas Fuller, Eric Schmitt, Chris Buckley, Edward Wong, Andrew Jacobs, Poypiti Amatatham, Matthew L. Wald, Bree Feng, Mia Li and Amy Qin of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/10/2014