Iranian traveling on stolen passport was seeking asylum
Iranian traveling on Malaysia Airlines with stolen passport was seeking asylum
(about 2 hours later)
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysian and international police officials played down the likelihood of terrorism in the disappearance of a Malaysian Airlines jet, but released the names of two Iranians who traveled aboard the plane using stolen passports.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysian and international authorities said Tuesday that two Iranians who boarded an ill-fated passenger jet with fake passports did not appear to have any terrorist links.
Interpol chief Ronald Noble and Malaysia’s Inspector General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar said in separate news conferences that the two Iranian men did not appear to have any terrorist links, despite earlier speculation prompted by their use of the stolen travel documents.
“The more information we get, the more we are inclined to conclude it is not a terrorist incident,” Ronald Noble, secretary general of the international police agency Interpol, told reporters.
Investigators identified the two men as 19-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad and Delavar Seyed Mohammad Reza, 29. They said Mehrdad was trying to seek asylum in Germany. When he did not arrive as planned, his mother contacted Malaysian authorities and helped identify him.
That conclusion seemed to snuff out one of the few leads investigators had gathered about the vanished Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 as search teams battled wind and whitecaps while looking for any sign of debris.
Speaking to journalists in Kuala Lumpur, Khalid, speaking specifically of Mehrdad, said “we believe he is not likely to be a member of any terrorist group.” Reza’s presence on the plane was still being investigated, but in his news conference Noble discounted the likelihood of terrorism as the cause of the plane’s disappearance.
Although the Malaysian investigation continues to look for signs of foul play, including sabotage or hijacking, authorities seemed to downplay any connection between the plane’s fate and the two passengers who boarded it with fake Austrian and Italian documents. They were identified as Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, 19, and Delavar Seyed Mohammad Reza, 29. Both arrived in Malaysia the same day, Feb. 28, officials said.
As the investigation stretched into its fourth day, Khalid said investigators are now concentrating on four main possible causes for the plane’s disappearance: hijacking, sabotage, and psychological and personal problems among passengers and crew.
At a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, Khalid Abu Bakar, inspector general of Malaysia’s police, said that the 19-year-old was trying to migrate to Germany: His mother had been waiting for him in Frankfurt, then called Malaysian authorities when he did not show up. Interpol identified the other Iranian at a separate news conference, though his reasons for traveling were not immediately clear.
Chinese public security officials visited Malaysian police Tuesday morning and delivered photos and profiles of all 153 Chinese on board, he said. Malaysian investigators are now going through all the photos and profiles of the passengers for new leads.
Khalid said that Malaysia, four days into its search, has been examining images of baggage, studying closed-circuit monitors for suspicious behavior at the airport terminal and trying to obtain photos and profiles of all 227 passengers on board. Chinese public security officials visited Malaysian police Tuesday morning and provided the information on all 153 Chinese on board.
Other governments have told the Malaysian government they had no prior knowledge of any terrorism, Khalid said.
But Khalid admitted there was no leading theory about what happened to the plane.
While Malaysian officials said Monday that they removed the baggage of five passengers who checked in but did not board the airplane, on Tuesday they reversed themselves saying that everyone who checked in for the flight boarded the plane and there were no passengers who booked the flight and did not board. “Everybody that booked the flight boarded the plane,” Khalid said.
“What confirmed information do we have? Nothing,” he said.
Asked for more details on how personal problems might be relevant, Khalid threw out a hypothetical situation that perhaps someone could have taken out substantial life insurance or owed a lot of money.
Since the plane disappeared Saturday morning from civilian radar without issuing a distress call, search teams from 10 nations have been scouring two vast areas of sea, one east of Malaysia, one to the west. If the plane followed its flight path to Beijing, its remains would be in the eastern area — the Gulf of Thailand.
Khalid rebutted criticism, including a recent scathing statement by Interpol, that Malaysian authorities did not run the stolen passports against Interpol’s database.
But a new, unconfirmed theory surfaced Tuesday that suggested the jet had veered off course, ending up in the Malacca Strait. Reuters news agency, citing an unidentified Malaysian military source, said the plane flew across the Malaysian peninsula in its final minutes, where it was picked up by military radar. Malaysian media reported that some residents spotted a plane flying at about 3,000 feet — 10 times lower than cruising altitude — near the eastern city of Kota Bharu.
“There are 14,226,140 reports of stolen passports in the database, so we have to work by intelligence,” he said. “We didn’t have any prior intelligence on the possibilities of terrorism so the two stolen passports were not supplied to the immigration department.”
If the plane dropped from a low altitude into the Malacca Strait, it might explain the lack of major debris field. Malaysia Airlines said in a statement early Tuesday that the western coast of Malaysia was “now the focus” of the search. But a spokeswoman for the airline later said the wording was a mistake and that there was no particular emphasis on any location.
Meanwhile, authorities have expanded the search to an area in the hundreds of miles, intensifying an already complicated effort with least 40 vessels and 34 aircraft from 10 countries.
Crews are not yet using underground technology to search the sea floor.
The Reuters news agency quoted an unnamed military source in the country as saying that the plane apparently changed its planned northeasterly course towards China, and flew west for an hour or more after air traffic officials had lost contact with it.
The search process so far has been fruitless, and those involved say it is becoming harder by the hour. Ten countries, 42 vessels and 35 aircraft are involved in the operation, but pilots and planes need rest and maintenance, and Malaysia might need to scale back its search effort in the coming days.
The search area has been expanded into the Adaman Sea, off Malaysia’s west coast.
Meanwhile, wind and waves have expanded the search area, and whitecaps made it difficult Tuesday for search teams to spot wreckage — at least for the many crews working without radar technology. The United States is using both P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft and helicopters that fly just 500 feet above the water and depend on crews to spot potential debris.
Searchers are contending with wind and currents as the hunt enters its fourth day. And early prospects of spotted debris or clues have repeatedly turned out to be dead-ends, leaving investigators flummoxed.
With the surveillance aircraft, “the software that goes with the radar is smart enough to cancel out those waves,” Cmdr. William Marks, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, said in a phone interview from the Gulf of Thailand. “However, if you’re just using your eyeballs, it is a significant challenge, because the water is not flat any more.”
“This unprecedented missing aircraft mystery — as you can put it — it is mystifying,” Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, director general of Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation, said at a news conference Monday in Kuala Lumpur.
With a void of information about what went wrong, investigators have focused on trying to find evidence of sabotage, hijacking or some psychological or personal problem among the passengers or crew.
“Search and rescue is a painstaking, long, effort,” said Michel Merluzeau, a managing partner at aerospace consultancy G2. “You have to move methodically. It is perhaps harder with the integration of multiple assets from multiple nations, with very different concept of operations and very different capabilities.”
Asked for more details on how personal problems might be relevant, Khalid threw out a hypothetical situation that perhaps someone could have taken out substantial life insurance and used the crash as a payoff for his family.
The U.S. Navy dispatched a second ship Monday to assist an emergency operation in the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea. But as in the previous two days of searching, no wreckage from Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 appeared.
Another particularly sensitive possibility, mentioned by aviation experts but not by Malaysian authorities, is pilot suicide, in which the pilot could have turned off the transponder and deviated from the flight path.
China, which has expressed mounting frustration with the Malaysia-led investigation, said Monday night on its Defense Ministry Web site that it has deployed 10 satellites to help in the search, purging them of their original commands.
The Malaysian government said search areas had been significantly expanded to include a larger square of the Gulf of Thailand and, to the west, a swath that reached farther north, toward the Andaman Sea.
For the plane to have reached the Andaman Sea it would have had to cross the Malaysian peninsula without being detected by ground radar; implying a major failure in Malaysia’s air traffic controls. It would also imply the plane had been hijacked, or driven way off course by a possibly suicidal pilot.
In Thailand, officials interviewed travel agents in the beach resort of Pattaya, where tickets were apparently issued for the two men who later boarded the flight with stolen passports, according to the Associated Press. The two men’s fake identities had raised the possibility that a terrorist attack brought down the Boeing 777, which was carrying 227 passengers from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it vanished Saturday.
But U.S. and other officials say they have found no evidence of terrorist involvement.
Senior American officials dismissed reports that a group called the Chinese Martyrs’ Brigade had asserted responsibility for the plane’s disappearance. “No group by that name has been previously identified, and it is not clear who is behind the claim,” said a U.S. intelligence official who was not authorized to be quoted by name.
Numerous scenarios
In a vacuum of evidence about what went wrong aboard the flight, speculation turned to the possibility of pilot suicide, an extraordinarily rare occurrence.
“You have to ask the question,” said a U.S. aviation official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The Malaysia Airlines flight reportedly was being tracked by radar when its transponder went dark. There were no radio transmissions to indicate that anything was amiss aboard the plane. The transponder signals and radio communication are controlled by the pilot.
There have been two cases in recent years in which a pilot or crew member is believed to have intentionally caused a plane to crash: the disaster involving SilkAir Flight 185, which spiraled into the ground in Indonesia in 1997, killing 97 passengers and seven crew members; and the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, which plunged into the Atlantic south of Nantucket in 1999, killing 217 people.
There have been two cases in recent years in which a pilot or crew member is believed to have intentionally caused a plane to crash: the disaster involving SilkAir Flight 185, which spiraled into the ground in Indonesia in 1997, killing 97 passengers and seven crew members; and the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, which plunged into the Atlantic south of Nantucket in 1999, killing 217 people.
But Steve Marks, a Miami aviation lawyer who represented families in two instances in which an airliner plummeted from cruising altitude, pointed to a mechanical failure as the most likely cause of the Malaysia tragedy.
But Steve Marks, a Miami aviation lawyer who represented families in two instances in which an airliner plummeted from cruising altitude, pointed to a mechanical failure as the most likely cause of the Malaysia Airlines tragedy.
“There can be a mechanical problem that can occur at altitude, where the pilots are unable to report the failure and the aircraft is lost on radar,” he said.
“There can be a mechanical problem that can occur at altitude, where the pilots are unable to report the failure and the aircraft is lost on radar,” he said.
Nonetheless, he said, the failure of all communications from the Malaysia Air flight made it “the most mysterious” crash in his recollection.
Nonetheless, he said, the failure of all communications from Flight MH370 made it “the most mysterious” crash in his recollection.
A ‘creeping line’
Qin Gang, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, pushed Malaysia on Tuesday to “step up efforts” in its search and to perform “other follow-up work including comforting the relatives.” Malaysia Airlines said it would provide $5,000 to families for out-of-pocket necessities as they mourn and decide whether to travel to a command center in Kuala Lumpur. The money is separate from compensation that victims stand to receive eventually.
On Monday, the USS Kidd joined the USS Pinckney in surveying the area where the plane is presumed to have crashed, officials said. The ships and their Seahawk helicopters were searching in a zigzag pattern known as a “creeping line,” Navy officials said.
Wan and Denyer reported from Beijing. Ashley Halsey, Ernesto Londoño and Adam Taylor in Washington, and Liu Liu, Gu Jinglu and Xu Jing in Beijing contributed to this report.
“Just from the air, we can see things as small as almost the size of your hand or a basketball. It’s not a matter of if we can see it. It’s an extremely large area,” a spokesman for the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, Cmdr. William Marks, said in an interview with the BBC.
On Monday, hopes briefly centered on a rectangular orange object that authorities said might have been a life raft. But when a Vietnamese helicopter recovered the piece of flotsam, it was identified as “a moss-covered cap of a cable reel,” the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam said on its Web site.
It was not the first time hopes have been dashed in the search.
Late Sunday, Vietnamese authorities said one of their aircraft had spotted a rectangular object that could have been an inner door from the plane. By Monday, ships and planes could not locate the object. Meanwhile, sightings of what had resembled a piece of the plane’s tail turned out to be logs tied together, Malaysian authorities said.
Two oil slicks, between six and nine miles long, consistent with fuel left by a downed jetliner, were tested and found to not be connected to the plane.
In Thailand, police Lt. Col. Ratchthapong Tia-sood said an Iranian man known only as “Mr. Ali” had contacted the Grand Horizon travel agency in Pattaya to book flight tickets for the two men using stolen passports, according to the AP. Grand Horizon asked another agency in the resort town to issue the one-way tickets, the AP reported.
“We have to look further into this Mr. Ali’s identity, because it’s almost a tradition to use an alias when doing business around here,” the police officer told the AP.
The FBI has offered to send forensic help and experts, but the countries leading the investigation have declined, a U.S. law enforcement official said Monday.
The men were using passports stolen in Thailand in 2012 that belonged to Luigi Maraldi, 37, of Italy and Christian Kozel, 30, of Austria.
For many relatives of the passengers, who have grown increasingly angry awaiting news at a Beijing hotel, the conversation Tuesday centered on “consolation money” that they said Malaysia Airlines had begun offering. Some relatives left for Kuala Lumpur Tuesday morning on rushed passports and visas that had been arranged by the Chinese and Malaysian government.
Reflecting the anger and suspicion among many, one relative said that the airline had offered $5,000 but that he was hesitant to take it because he could not read the entire agreement, which was written in English.
“Until I can read it word for word in Chinese, I won’t sign anything,” he said. “They may use it shake off all responsibility.”
Denyer reported from Beijing. Ashley Halsey, Ernesto Londoño and Adam Taylor in Washington, and Liu Liu, Gu Jinglu and Xu Jing in Beijing contributed to this report.
