Two on missing Malaysia jet used stolen EU passports

 

 

Foreign ministry officials in Rome and Vienna have confirmed that names of two nationals listed on the manifest of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight match passports reported stolen in Thailand.

 

Neither European was on the plane, which disappeared yesterday less than an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, officials said. The Italian was traveling in Thailand and the Austrian was located in his native country.

The father of the Italian man told The Associated Press that his son's passport had been stolen a year and a half ago while travelling in Thailand.

"He deposited it with rental car agency, and when he returned the car it was gone," Walter Maraldi said by telephone from his home in the northern Emilia-Romagna region.

Walter Maraldi said authorities could not tell him whether the stolen passport or a counterfeit copy was used by a passenger to board the aircraft.

The father said his son Luigi Maraldi, 37, called his parents from Thailand to tell them he was fine after hearing news reports that an Italian with his name was on board the missing airplane.

Austrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Weiss confirmed that a name listed on the manifest matches an Austrian passport reported stolen two years ago in Thailand. Weiss would not confirm the Austrian traveler's identity.

"We have no information on who might have stolen the passport," Weiss said.

Search and rescue crews across Southeast Asia are scrambling to find the Boeing 777 that disappeared from air traffic control screens over waters between Malaysia and Vietnam early yesterday, leaving the fates of the 239 people aboard, including two New Zealanders, in doubt.

Vietnamese air force planes yesterday (local time) spotted two large oil slicks close to where the jet went missing, the first sign that the aircraft had crashed.

The oil slicks were spotted late yesterday off the southern tip of Vietnam and were each between 10 kilometres and 15 kilometres long, the Vietnamese government said in a statement. There was no confirmation that the slicks were related to the missing plane, but the statement said they were consistent with the kinds that would be produced by the two fuel tanks of a crashed jetliner.

Source: AP