man this thing is just crazy. The oil slicks were not from the plane.
Quote:
Officials investigating the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 plane with 239 people on board say oil slicks spotted by rescue crews in the South China Sea do not belong to the aircraft.
Malaysian maritime officials spotted the slicks and sent a sample to a lab to see if it came from the plane, but the results were negative, said Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, at a press conference late Monday.
More than 48 hours after the plane disappeared from radar screens, a multinational search team consisting of dozens of ships and aircraft had failed to find any sign of the aircraft's fate.
The American guided-missile destroyer USS Kidd joined the USS Pinckney in search efforts Monday, the Navy said. Malaysian officials said the search area will be expanded Monday.
“The amount of water – the distance between Vietnam and Malaysia is probably the size of the state of Pennsylvania, so there really is quite a bit of water that needs to be investigated,” Robert Mark, a commercial pilot and former air traffic controller, said Monday on “Fox & Friends.”
Rahman said that investigators were pursuing "every angle," including the possibility of an attempted hijacking, in an effort to understand what happened that caused the plane to vanish early Saturday morning, local time.
“We don’t know exactly what happened to the aircraft,” he said late Monday, insisting that a search and rescue operation was still ongoing – not a disaster recovery mission.
Searchers were dealt a double blow Monday when a floating yellow object that was believed to be a life raft from the plane when it was spotted Sunday turned out to be the moss-covered cap of a cable reel, according to Vietnam's civil aviation authority. Earlier in the day, Vietnamese officials said that they had not been able to locate a rectangular object that appeared to be one of the plane's doors.
Doan Huu Gia, the chief of Vietnam's search and rescue coordination center, said Monday that four planes and seven ships from Vietnam were searching for the rectangular object but nothing had been found.
There are also questions over how two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft – which was scheduled to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing -- using stolen passports.
A senior Malaysian police official told Reuters Monday that there have been past incidents of people being caught trying to fly out of Kuala Lumpur with explosives and fake passports.
"We have stopped men with false or stolen passports and carrying explosives, who have tried to get past KLIA [airport] security and get on to a plane," the police official said. "There have been two or three incidents, but I will not divulge the details."
Interpol said it knew about the stolen passports but said no authorities checked its vast databases on stolen documents before the Boeing jetliner departed Saturday.
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."
The thefts of the two 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 flight tickets with those names were issued Thursday from a travel agency in the beach resort of Pattaya in eastern Thailand. A person who answered the phone at the agency said she could not comment.
The ticket purchases reportedly took place almost simultaneously, and the tickets were numbered consecutively, according to the BBC.
A telephone operator on a China-based KLM hotline confirmed Sunday that passengers named Maraldi and Kozel had also bought one-way tickets on a KLM flight that departed from Beijing for 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 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.
Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference Sunday that authorities were investigating footage of the two people who boarded the plane using the fake passports.
Interpol has long sounded the alarm that growing international travel has underpinned a new market for identity theft: Bogus passports are mostly used by illegal immigrants, but also pretty much anyone looking to travel unnoticed such as drug runners or terrorists. More than 1 billion times last year, travelers boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol's database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, the police agency said.
“The majority of passengers were Chinese – it was a flight going from Malaysia to China. And what’s the group that’s really going after China right now? It’s called the east Turkistan Islamic movement, Ryan Mauro, a national security analyst, told “Fox & Friends” on Monday. “You would think that they would immediately come out and claim responsibility but in the past they’ve waited a month to claim responsibility.”
Rahman also said the baggage of five passengers who had checked in to the flight but did not board the plane were removed before it departed, he said. Airport security was strict according to international standards, surveillance has been done and the airport has been audited, he said.
Meanwhile, hundreds of distraught relatives were gathered in a hotel in Beijing, waiting to be flown to Malaysia. Of the 227 passengers, two-thirds were Chinese. There were also 38 passengers and 12 crew members from Malaysia, and others from elsewhere in Asia, Europe and North America, including three Americans.
"We accept God's will. Whether he is found alive or dead, we surrender to Allah," said Selamat Omar, a Malaysian whose 29-year-old son Mohamad Khairul Amri Selamat was heading to Beijing for a business trip. He said he was expecting a call from his son after the flight's scheduled arrival time at 6:30 a.m. Saturday. Instead he got a call from the airline to say the plane was missing.
Possible causes of the flight’s disappearance included some sort of explosion, a catastrophic failure of the plane's engines, extreme turbulence, or pilot error or even suicide. Establishing what happened with any certainty will need 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.
"The military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back, and in some parts this was corroborated by civilian radar," Daud said at a news conference.
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.
A total of 34 aircraft and 40 ships from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and the United States were deployed to the area where ground controllers lost contact with the plane on the maritime border between Malaysia and Vietnam.
Family members of Philip Wood, a 50-year-old 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.
The other two Americans were identified on the passenger manifest as 4-year-old Nicole Meng and 2-year-old Yan Zhang. 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 a large area. 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 into the crash. 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.
Malaysia Airlines has a good safety record, as does the 777, which had not had a fatal crash in its 19-year history until an Asiana Airlines plane crashed last July in San Francisco, killing three passengers, all Chinese teenagers.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
_________________
"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away." Frank Coztansa wrote:
I have MANY years of experience in trying to appreciate steaming piles of dogshit.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
