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A Malaysian minister on Sunday said he was “puzzled” that two Asian-looking men were able to board missing flight MH370 using stolen Italian and Austrian passports with the names Luigi Maraldi and Christian Kozel. |
Malaysian Airlines, meanwhile, said it had found no discrepancies between the names on the passports and itineraries of the 227 passengers, adding that it was not responsible for the authenticity of passports.
Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi blamed Malaysian immigration authorities and promised an investigation into the lapse in airport security.
“I am still puzzled how (immigration officers) cannot think - an Italian and Austrian but with Asian facial features,” the Malaysian national news agency quoted Zahid as saying.
The minister added that it was often “difficult to determine the authenticity of an international passport” because not all countries use a biometric system and bar codes as Malaysia does.
Security experts said it was still relatively common for passengers to travel in Asia with stolen or forged passports, pointing to the fact that illegal documents have been used for several decades to facilitate illegal migration, drug smuggling and other crimes.
Illegal migrants from China often use forged or stolen passports from more affluent countries including Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea.
The passports of Maraldi and Kozel were lost or stolen in Thailand, a notorious hub for document forgeries.
Black markets in stolen and forged documents are often operated by South Asian gangs who are well connected with similar rackets in Europe, primarily in Spain, according to Thai police sources.
Both Thailand and Spain attract millions of tourists a year, and have relaxed visa requirements to facilitate the tourist flow.
“It shouldn’t come as a big surprise, since we’re getting about 26mn tourists each year,” Thai foreign ministry spokesman Sek Wannamethee said of the trade in stolen passports.
Thailand-based passport forgery gangs have been linked to terrorist attacks in the past.
Police in Thailand said they arrested a Thai woman in 2009 after Spanish police linked her to a Pakistani-led gang that sold fake passports to terrorists involved in the Madrid train bombing of 2004, which killed 191 people.
The passports were allegedly stolen from tourists in Spain, sent to Bangkok to be altered, and returned to Spain, investigators said.
Apart from allowing people using false documents to pass through immigration and board flights, some Asian airlines have been fined for breaches of security protocol.
Malaysian Airlines was fined in 2012 for altering a passport number to allow a Malaysian passenger to board a flight to Auckland despite a “do not board” request from New Zealand after check-in.
The New Zealand government said it also fined Cathay Pacific for failing to provide information on a South African citizen who boarded a flight to Auckland via Hong Kong during the same year.
With regards to the missing MH370 flight, Chinese commentators including Zahid have pointed the finger at lax security in Malaysia.
“Using stolen passports to board is quite surprising because the security checks at airports are very strict,” said Zhang Qihuai, an expert in aviation law at the state-run China University of Political Science and Law.
“Cases like this would not happen in China,” Zhang told DPA. “Even for 9/11, the terrorists used their real passports.”
Despite the assurances, passenger security checks appear little better at airports in China and other Asian nations.
Airline staff in China sometimes allow foreign passengers to board flights even when names on their online bookings and passports are not identical.
A DPA reporter once passed through Chinese immigration unchallenged despite using a cancelled passport with the corner cut off.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US, Interpol, the global police agency, created a database for governments to screen for fraudulent use of passports and other documents.
Yet Malaysia, China and most other countries do not use the Interpol system, with nearly half of last year’s 800mn enquiries coming from the US and the United Kingdom.
“This is a situation we had hoped never to see,” Ronald Noble, Interpol’s secretary general, said of the disappearance of MH370.
“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 said.
Zhang said there were two main reasons why China did not use the Interpol system.
“Once you use the Interpol system to input all the data, the operational capacity (needed) for the airports would be enormous,” he said.
“The other reason is that the alert level of the airports is not high enough,” he concluded.