Thai police and Interpol have questioned
the proprietors of a travel agency in the resort town of Pattaya that sold
one-way tickets to two men now known to have been travelling on flight MH370
using stolen passports.
With no confirmation that the Boeing 777 en
route to Beijing with 239 people on board had crashed, hundreds of distraught
relatives waited anxiously for any news.
There has been no indication that the two
men had anything to do with the tragedy, but the use of stolen passports fueled
speculation of foul play, terrorism or a hijacking gone wrong. Malaysia has
shared their details with Chinese and American intelligence agencies.
Malaysia’s police chief was quoted by local
media as saying that one of the men had been identified.
Civil aviation Chief Azharuddin Abdul
Rahman declined to confirm this, but said they were of “non-Asian” appearance,
adding that authorities were looking at the possibility the men were connected
to a stolen passport syndicate.
Asked by a reporter what they looked like
“roughly,” he said: “Do you know of a footballer by the name of (Mario)
Balotelli? He is an Italian. Do you know how he looks like?”
A reporter then asked, “Is he black?” and
the aviation chief replied, “Yes.”
As relatives of the 239 people on the
flight grappled with fading hope, attention focused on how two passengers
managed to board the 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 jet departed.
Warning that “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.”
The two stolen passports, one belonging to
Austrian Christian Kozel and the other 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.
Electronic booking records show that
one-way tickets with those names were issued Thursday from a travel agency in
the beach resort of Pattaya in eastern Thailand.
Thai police Col. Supachai Phuykaeokam said
those reservations were placed with the agency by a second travel agency in
Pattaya, which told police it had received the bookings from a China Southern
Airlines office in Bangkok.
The owners of the second Pattaya travel
agency refused to talk to reporters. Thai police and Interpol officers went in
to question the owners.
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.
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