Posted on 03/09/2014 6:43:26 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
ROME (Reuters) - International police agency Interpol said at least two passports recorded as lost or stolen in its database were used by passengers on board a missing Malaysia Airlines flight, and said it was "examining additional suspect passports" on Sunday.
Interpol said no checks of its database had been made by any country on an Austrian and an Italian passport between the time that they were stolen and the departure of the flight.
"Whilst it is too soon to speculate about any connection between these stolen passports and the missing plane, it is clearly of great concern that any passenger was able to board an international flight using a stolen passport listed in Interpol's databases," Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said in a statement.
I don’t fly internationally and don’t have a passport. Are passports checked for anything? I know you need a picture. Would being stolen not be flagged at some point?
Yes, passports are run through multiple databases when checking in at the airport. Agents around the world follow a similar protocol. Not sure if there is an international standard or if each nation sets their rules.
Earlier, Malaysia’s air force chief told reporters that military radar indicated that the plane may have turned from its flight route before losing contact.
Air force chief Rodzali Daud didn’t say which direction the plane might have taken when it apparently went off route.
“We are trying to make sense of this,” he told a media conference. “The military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back and in some parts, this was corroborated by civilian radar.”
It is just not believable that stolen passports were not caught. The passports themselves can be flagged in computer systems of course, there are computer chips in pports too that can be read not only at check-in but in other areas of the airports [security for example.]
How did the stolen pports defeat these measures AND the measures we don’t know about?
Is this strangeness related to the disappearance?
Sounds to me like an episode of Burn Notice.
Maybe a person on the ground in the check in process was a collaborator?
Didn't you read this part?
it is too soon to speculate about any connection between these stolen passports and the missing plane
You can't do that yet.
Interpol: No database checks pre-flight
INTERPOL SAYS NO COUNTRY checked its database for information about stolen passports that were used to board the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared with 239 people on board while en route to China, as Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, director general of the Department of Civil Aviation, top right, said Sunday finding the plane is the ‘utmost priority,’ while family members await word of their loved ones.
I read that not all countries subscribe to the Interpol database that automatically checks passport numbers.
It’s very simple - when I had my passport stolen a few years ago, I was issued a new one with a new number by the US Embassy in the country where I was at that time, and the old number immediately entered the stolen passports database and would have turned up immediately if anyone had tried to use it.
But you have to consult the database, and perhaps they didn’t do so - until after the plane disappeared.
That’s interesting. In other words, Malaysian security didn’t bother to check passport validity. I wonder if this was standard, or if somebody intentionally omitted the check this time.
Were the Caped-Crusader and Boy Wonder pulverized by stolen passport wielding spy-thugs? Or was it all just a run of Dynamic-duo bad luck?
This tells me that there was a catastrophic failure at multiple security points.
The pports were not ever checked more than visually - not ever! Not at check in, not at security, not at the gate... and those are just the points I know about.,
stinks
If they did not run the pports thru the system, how did they know, for example, the pport number? What did they do, write it down on a piece of scratch paper as the individual checked in?
I the pport was ever run thru the system, it would be caught. And you have to run it to check in at least. On int'l flights this is a big deal. How it could not be done is just unthinkable.
But if it was never run thru, how did they have such info to run after the fact?
Hope they eventually get to the truth.
Don’t know how factual this is:
Passenger manifest. Several muslim names, it appears.
I have not been following this very closely, but I thought they found oil slicks where the plane went down? So they don’t know where the plane is? Would it be possible that it landed somewhere or would it have been tracked by multiple radars if this were the case? I would have thought that the black box could be tracked by satellite.
Well, this is asia, so it's readily believable. As long as officials seem to be doing something that looks like checking, that's good enough. After this tragedy though, they might start checking for real.
Yes, there would be; Malaysia is 61% muslim.
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