Navies from two of Malaysia's neighbors were pursuing new leads as Sunday turned into Monday in the region.
Vietnam's navy has
spotted a floating object about 80 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of
Vietnam's Tho Chu Island, which is off the country's southwest coast in
the Gulf of Thailand, Vietnam National Search and Rescue Committee
spokesman Hung Nguyen told CNN. The object was spotted by a Vietnamese
navy rescue aircraft at about 7:30 a.m. ET Sunday (6:30 p.m. local
time). Because of the dark, the navy aircraft could not get close enough
to identify the floating object and was recalled to base. Three search
and rescue boats have since been deployed to that location.
Meanwhile, Thailand's
navy is shifting its focus in the search away from the Gulf of Thailand
and the South China Sea, Thai Navy Rear Adm. Karn Dee-ubon told CNN on
Sunday. The shift came at the request of the Malaysians, who are looking
into possibilities the plane turned around and could have gone down in
the Andaman Sea, near Thailand's border, Karn said.
The Andaman Sea lies to
the west of a narrow strip of Thailand that ends in the Malaysian
Peninsula, while the Gulf of Thailand lies to the east of that Thai
isthmus.
One promising lead has
turned out to be a dead end. A "strange object" spotted by a Singaporean
search plane late Sunday afternoon is not debris from the missing
jetliner, a U.S. official familiar with the issue told CNN on Sunday.
A U.S. reconnaissance
plane "thought it saw something like debris, but it was a false alarm,"
said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
By the end of the day
Sunday, more than 40 planes and more than two dozen ships from several
countries were involved in the search. Two reconnaissance aircraft from
Australia and one plane and five sea vessels from Indonesia were the
latest additions, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, the director general of civil
aviation in Malaysia, told reporters Sunday. In addition, the Chinese
navy dispatched a frigate and an amphibious landing ship, according to
an online post by China's navy.
Those reinforcements join
the rescue teams already scouring the South China Sea, near the Gulf of
Thailand, for any sign of where the flight, operated by Malaysia's
flagship airline, might have gone down, Malaysian authorities said.
The area in focus for
most of the search, about 90 miles south of Tho Chu Island, is where a
Vietnamese plane reportedly spotted oil slicks that stretched between 6
and 9 miles.
"I can confirm that
there was an oil slick, no debris. But what we are doing now, I was told
that the Vietnamese aircrafts are on the site right now to verify what
actually is it on the surface of those waters," said acting Malaysian
Transportation Minister Hishammuddin bin Tun Hussein.
Big questions far outweigh the few fragments of information that have emerged about the plane's disappearance:
What happened to the plane? Why was no distress signal issued? Who exactly was aboard?
The flight may have
changed course and turned back toward Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian military
officials said at a news conference Sunday.
But the pilot appears to
have given no signal to authorities that he was turning around, the
officials said, attributing the change of course to indications from
radar data.
As the search continues, the agonizing wait goes on for relatives of the 227 passengers
and 12 crew members on board the plane. Video from Reuters showed
Malaysia Airlines personnel in Beijing, where Flight 370 was headed,
helping family members apply for expedited passports so they could fly
to Kuala Lumpur early this week.
Among the passengers, 154 people were from China or Taiwan; 38 Malaysians, five Indian nationals and three U.S. citizens. Five of the passengers were younger than 5 years old.
Malaysia Airlines said
Monday that initial financial assistance has been given out to all
passengers' families "over and above their basic needs." Each family has
also been assigned at least one caregiver.
"Malaysia Airlines'
primary focus at this point in time is to care for the families. This
means providing them with timely information, travel facilities,
accommodation, meals, medical and emotional support," the airline said
in a statement.
Stolen passports
Interpol tweeted Sunday that it is "examining additional suspect #passports in connection" with the missing flight.
Earlier, the
international law enforcement agency said at least two passports -- one
Austrian and one Italian -- recorded in its stolen and lost travel
documents database were used by passengers onboard the flight. The
passports were added to the database after being stolen in separate
incidents over the past two years, Interpol said.
Italy and Austria have said that none of their citizens were onboard the plane.
"No checks of the stolen
Austrian and Italian passports were made by any country between the
time they were entered into INTERPOL's database and the departure of
flight MH 370. At this time, INTERPOL is therefore unable to determine
on how many other occasions these passports were used to board flights
or cross borders," the agency said in a Sunday statement.
It added that passengers
were able to board planes more than a billion times last year without
having their passports screened by Interpol's databases.
The Italian man whose
passport was allegedly used, Luigi Maraldi, contacted the Italian
consulate in Phuket, Thailand, on Saturday, after receiving a call from
his parents, Italian Consul Franco Cavaliere told CNN on Sunday.
Maraldi told Reuters he
was inundated with phone calls, texts and social media inquiries asking
if he was alive and well. He soon discovered that he was the subject of
stories about the missing plane.
Maraldi is staying on
Phuket Island as a tourist, and his passport disappeared in July 2013,
Cavaliere said. Maraldi told Reuters he got a new passport after his old
one was stolen.
"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," said Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble
in a statement.
The two passengers who used the passports in question appear to have bought their tickets together.
The tickets were bought
from China Southern Airlines at identical prices, paid in Thailand's
baht currency, according to China's official e-ticket verification
system Travelsky. The ticket numbers are contiguous, which indicates the
tickets were issued together.
The two tickets booked
with China Southern Airlines both start in Kuala Lumpur, fly to Beijing,
and then onward to Amsterdam. The Italian passport's ticket continues
to Copenhagen, the Austrian's to Frankfurt.
Authorities say they are investigating the identities of some of those onboard who appear to have issues with their passports.
"I've seen these reports
about the passports. We're looking into that, but we don't have
anything to confirm at this point," U.S. deputy national security
adviser Tony Blinken told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday. "The
reports certainly raise questions and concerns, and that's exactly why
we're looking into them. But right now, it would be premature to
speculate," he said.
Terrorism concerns
A fuller picture of what happened may not become available until searchers find the plane and its flight data recorder.
"We have not been able to locate anything, see anything," Rahman told reporters Sunday.
The passport mystery raised concerns about the possibility of terrorism, but officials cautioned that it was still too early to arrive at any conclusions.
Malaysian authorities
have been in contact with counterterrorism organizations about possible
passport issues, acting Transportation Minister Hishammuddin Hussein
said Sunday.
He didn't specify how many potential passport issues there were, saying authorities are looking at the whole passenger manifest.
Additionally, no inquiry
was made by Malaysia Airlines to determine if any passengers on the
flight were traveling on stolen passports, he said. Many airlines do not
check the database, he said.
Five passengers ended up
not boarding the aircraft. Their bags were removed and were not onboard
the jet when it disappeared, Hussein said.
A U.S. intelligence
official said that no link to terrorism had been discovered so far, but
that authorities were still investigating.
Another possible explanation for the use of the stolen passports is illegal immigration.
There are previous cases
of illegal immigrants using fake passports to try to enter Western
countries. And Southeast Asia is known to be a booming market for stolen
passports.
Disappearing during cruise
There is a precedent for
a modern jetliner to fall from the sky while "in the cruise" and lie
hidden for months, according to CNN aviation correspondent Richard
Quest.
On June 1, 2009, Air
France Flight 447 was en route from Rio De Janeiro to Paris when
communications ended suddenly from the Airbus A330, another
state-of-the-art aircraft.
It took four searches
over the course of nearly two years to locate the bulk of flight 447's
wreckage and the majority of the 228 bodies in a mountain range deep
under the ocean. It took even longer to find the cause of the disaster.
In May 2011, the
aircraft's voice recorder and flight data recorder were recovered from
the ocean floor after an extensive search using miniature submersible
vehicles.
It was not until July
2012 that investigators published their report, which blamed the crash
on a series of errors by the pilots and a failure to react effectively
to technical problems.
The missing Malaysia
Airlines plane had suffered damage in the past, airline CEO Ahmad
Jauhari Yahya said Sunday. The aircraft had a clipped wing tip, but
Boeing repaired it, and the jet was safe to fly, Yahya said.
The National
Transportation Safety Board announced late Saturday that a team of its
investigators was en route to Asia to help with the investigation, the
agency said.
If all those on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are found to have died, it will rank as the deadliest airline disaster since
November 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into a New
York neighborhood, killing all 260 people on board and five more on the
ground.
The deadliest commercial
air crash ever involving a single plane occurred almost 30 years ago on
August 12, 1985, in the mountains of central Japan. A total of 520
people were killed when Japan Airlines Flight 123 -- a Boeing 747 --
crashed not long after takeoff from Tokyo. Four people survived.
Link to source: http://edition.cnn.com
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