Free Republic

One of the two men who boarded Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 with a stolen passport was identified as a 19-year-old Iranian with no known terrorist connections, authorities said at a press conference today. Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said the man, named Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, was likely trying to enter Germany to seek asylum. His mother contacted authorities after he didn't arrive in Frankfurt. The other man who boarded the flight with a stolen passport has not been identified. The announcement was the first certain piece of news in what has become a baffling mystery over the fate...

Hunt Is Widened for Lost Malaysian Flight as Frustrations Mount; Debris Proves Unrelated to Jet Three days of fruitless air and sea search for a vanished Malaysia Airlines flight left investigators with no concrete evidence of what happened to the plane or the people aboard. The search area was widened as frustrations mounted across the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam, where the search was concentrated, and in hotels where the families of the missing passengers congregated in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.