Two Missing Passports Located, 39 Million More to Go

Conspiracy theorists had their work cut out for them as reports emerged that at least two passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370 — which mysteriously disappeared on Saturday with 239 people onboard while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing — had used stolen passports.

The plane was cruising during what is normally the safest portion of the journey when it vanished two hours into its flight. Concerns over the stolen passports led many to suspect a possible terrorist attack. Some even speculated that the flight's disappearance had something to do with the knife attack at Kunming railway station that killed 33 people earlier this month.

While no evidence has yet tied the stolen passports to a possible terrorist plot, the incident has revealed that people traveling with fake documents is much more common than many think, and that identity thieves can get away with boarding an international flight with relative ease.

Interpol, the intergovernmental organization that facilitates police cooperation worldwide, has records for more than 39 million travel documents that were reported lost or stolen in 166 countries.

In theory, airlines boarding passengers onto international flights should check their travel documents against Interpol's database of missing passports. But more often than not, they don’t.

“It is clearly of great concern that any passenger was able to board an international flight using a stolen passport listed in Interpol’s databases,” Interpol’s secretary general Ronald Noble said in a statement on Sunday. “This is a situation we had hoped never to see. For years Interpol has asked why should countries wait for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates.”

Noble rebuked Malasya Airlines for skimping on passport verification.

“If Malaysia Airlines and all airlines worldwide were able to check the passport details of prospective passengers against Interpol’s database, then we would not have to speculate whether stolen passports were used by terrorists to board MH 370,” Noble said.

This is not the first air tragedy to highlight such a security lapse. In 2010, after an Air India Express flight crash-landed in Mangalore, killing 158 people, it emerged that at least two of the passengers were traveling with fake documents.

Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the US Department of Homeland Security, told VICE News that the problem is mainly a “resource issue.”

“This is a big and complex system — it’s a live connection, it takes a lot of effort,” Rosenzweig said of Interpol’s verification system. “The adoption of worldwide real-time checking is still very much a work in progress.”

Rosenzweig described the checking of documents with Interpol as “a critical function,” but said that the process is “a layer of security that is really independent of, for example, bomb checks in the luggage compartment or physical checks of people.”

Among the millions of passports in Interpol’s database were those of an Italian named Luigi Maraldi and an Austrian named Christian Kozel, whose passports had been stolen in recent years while vacationing separately in Thailand.

The passengers that were traveling with their stolen documents were booked together to Beijing and then Amsterdam, with different European destinations after that. Rather than terrorists, some have suggested that the duo might have been drug mules.

“Most people traveling with stolen documents are illegal immigrants or drug dealers,” Rosenzweig said. “Terrorism cases are fairly rare.”

Authorities said on Sunday that they have closed-circuit footage of the two men. Malaysia’s civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman remarked in press conference on Monday that the men looked like the Italian soccer star Mario Balotelli, who is black.

Both passports were stolen in the Thai resort island of Phuket. Some 60,000 passports were reported stolen or missing between January 2012 and June 2013 in Thailand — which is a hub for trafficking of all sorts.

Thai officials are investigating a “passport ring” in the beach resort of Pattaya, where the tickets were purchased. The Financial Times reported on Monday that a Pattaya travel agent booked tickets for the two passengers at the request of an Iranian middleman named “Mr. Ali.”

Maraldi was again vacationing in Phuket when the plane went missing, and learned that his name was among those of the missing passengers from social media. At a news conference, he explained that friends in Italy were asking about him urgently on Facebook and WhatsApp, trying to determine whether he had died.

The identities of another two passengers are also potentially suspicious and are being investigated, Malaysian officials said, although information about them has not been released. Chinese news outlets reported that the identity of at least one of these passengers did not match the passport number that was used to board the aircraft.

Photo via Flickr