Interpol probes more suspect passports from missing flight

ROME (Reuters) - Interpol is investigating more suspect passports used to board a missing Malaysia Airlines flight, in addition to two European ones that were falsely used by unidentified passengers, the global police agency said on Sunday.

An Italian man and an Austrian man were falsely listed as passengers on Beijing-bound flight MH370, which disappeared after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur early on Saturday with 239 people aboard.

Authorities later confirmed the two men - Austrian Christian Kozel and Italian Luigi Maraldi - were not on the plane, and their passports had been stolen in Thailand within the last two years.

An Interpol spokeswoman said a check of all documents used to board the plane had revealed more "suspect passports" that were being further investigated.

She was unable to give further information on the number of documents or the country they related to.

Nice try but the example of burka-clad women breezing through security happened in Canada. Not in the U.S. which was the whole point of my post. Other countries are more lenient with their security so we should not complain about our security here because we don't have these kind of incidents. Also, we have not had a successful terrorist attack on an airplane leaving an U.S. airport since 9/11.

From the article you linked, here is an excerpt below explaining why the burka-clad women would not be exempt from a security screening here in the U.S.A.

In the United States there will be nothing to change because, according to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) because the agency will not allow airline passengers to get out of body imaging screening or pat-downs based on their religious beliefs.

leapfrog0202 wrote: “I’m flabbergasted that a stolen passport, reported as required, doesn’t raise flags on an international flight!... “

This is totally insane! Reading the entire article at the link above reveals:

A) Interpol states that no inquiries were ever made to their database of stolen/missing passports about the two European names falsely used to board the plane.

B) The database is NOT available the Airlines, only to police and other security officials.

C) Most countries do NOT even use the database to verify whether travelers are using stolen travel documents.

My comments:

I read a news article where a Malaysian Airline official in Beijing stated that the airline had no information about stolen passports being used, and went on to explain that the name of every passenger had been given to Chinese authorities who issued entry visas for them all before the flight even took off.

Why in the world would officials even ask for a passport if they are not even going to verify that it is valid?

I’m a bit surprised that China would be so careless about issuing travel visas. They otherwise seem to be very strict when it comes to security.

First you tried to pass off a Canadian incident to make your case. Now you are reaching deep into the Google archives to come up with a 2010 article from some obscure offshoot of WorldNetDaily. By the way, there was a flurry of articles I found from 2010 that was all from right-wing sites saying the same thing about this apparent agreement with "CAIR" (Council on Islamic-American Relations) that women in burkas only get a pat-down about the head and neck.

Can find no official verification of this and some 4 years later, we have no instances of burka-clad women taking down airplanes. And if burka-clad women were allowed to "breeze through" TSA security, I'm sure we would have hundreds of photos and articles about it by now and we wouldn't have to reference Glen Beck from 2010.

Now I'm a right-winger myself but I take exception to unfounded claims like this being bandied about as fact because it damages the conservative movement and our credibility. Makes us look like fools.

Since 9/11, we have had ZERO incidents of terrorism from airplanes leaving U.S. airports. I think this speaks well of U.S. airport security and the TSA.

Now is the TSA perfect? Of course not. Do they make mistakes? Of course they do. In one of the earlier articles you linked about the man with the colostomy bag who was driven to tears, he got an apology from the chief of the TSA and measures were taken to correct procedures going forward.

With hundreds of millions of airline passengers to screen every year, you are going to have some unfortunate incidents. The fact that you have to do a deep internet search to uncover some of them speaks to how seldom they are.

I've traveled by plane maybe 200 times since 9/11 and I have never had a bad incident other than the aggravation of standing in lines and having to take my shoes off and all that. Yes, it's inconvenient and yes, I now drive my car to trips of 200 miles or less where I used to fly. However, we no longer have instances of planes being hijacked and slammed into NYC skyscrapers.

BTW, no retort from you on trying to use the Canadian incident as an example of TSA not doing their job. That ruins your credibility with me. Did you think that I wasn't going to click-through on that link?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.