Could It Really Be A Terrorist Attack

Stolen Passports Prompt Terror Concerns in Missing Jet, Officials Say

BY PETE WILLIAMS, ROBERT WINDREM AND RICHARD ESPOSITO

U.S. officials told NBC News on Saturday that they are investigating terrorism concerns after revelations that two people apparently boarded the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner with stolen passports.

The officials said that they had found no clear link to terrorism. There are other criminal reasons, for example drug smuggling, that stolen passports might be used to board a plane.

Two names on the passenger manifest of the plane, Malaysia Flight 370, matched passports reported stolen in Thailand, one from an Italian man and the other from an Austrian man, according to foreign governments and NBC News sources.

The news, hours after the jet disappeared over the South China Sea with 239 people on board, significantly changed how U.S. officials looked at the disaster. The officials said they were checking into passenger manifests and going back through intelligence.

“We are aware of the reporting on the two stolen passports,” one senior official said. “We have not determined a nexus to terrorism yet, although it’s still very early, and that’s by no means definitive.”

There was still no sign of wreckage more than 24 hours after air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane, a red-eye from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. It vanished in relatively clear weather, without sending a distress signal, at what analysts said would have been cruising altitude. In a possible clue, Vietnamese planes spotted two oil slicks consistent with jet fuel in the water off Vietnam.

On board were 227 passengers and 12 crew. Most of the passengers were Chinese. Three were Americans — one adult and two children, according to the passenger manifest.

Desperate wait for families in Beijing after jet vanishesTODAY

In Beijing, anguished families gathered at the airport and were taken to a hotel to wait for what little information there was.

Search teams from Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and China were looking for wreckage, and the United States sent a naval destroyer into the South China Sea to help. The air search was called off during the night but was to resume at daylight Sunday, or early Saturday evening Eastern time.

The airline asked for prayers from the world.

The Italian on the passenger list was Luigi Maraldi, 37. His father, Walter Maraldi, told NBC News on Saturday that Luigi was vacationing in Thailand and had called to check in.

“We didn’t know about the accident,” the father said from Cesena, Italy. “Thank God he heard about it before us.”

Walter Maraldi said his son had his passport stolen a year ago in Thailand.

In Austria, the foreign ministry confirmed to NBC News that police had made contact with a citizen who was also on the passenger list, and who reported his passport stolen two years ago.

“We believe that the name and passport were used by an unidentified person to board the plane,” a spokesman for the ministry said.

It is unusual, but not unheard of, for one person to board a plane with a stolen passport. It is very rare for two people with stolen passports to board the same plane, terrorism analysts say.

Asked earlier whether terrorism was suspected in the disappearance of the jet, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said authorities were “looking at all possibilities,” The Associated Press reported.

Malaysia has not seen significant terrorist activity, and airport security there has tended to be exemplary.

Earlier in the day, U.S. officials told NBC News that “all we know is something quick and catastrophic” happened to the plane.

The investigation will probably take some time, partly because authorities would have to find wreckage and perform forensics tests. In the crash of TWA Flight 800, in 1996, it took more than a year to rule out terrorism.

While flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders, the so-called black boxes, can emit signals from underwater, it can be extremely difficult to find planes that disappear over the sea.

When Air France Flight 447 went down in the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, with 228 people on board on the way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, bodies and some parts of the plane were found within two weeks, but it took two years to find the main wreckage.

The last fatal crash for Malaysia Airlines was in 1995, when 34 people were killed near the city of Tawau. In 1977, a domestic Malaysia Airlines flight was hijacked and crashed, killing 100 people.

Andy Eckardt, Claudio Lavanga, Erin McClam and Michele Neubert of NBC News contributed to this report. Reuters and The Associated Press also contributed.

First published March 8th 2014, 9:22 am

PETE WILLIAMS