BEIJING —
Emergency teams expanded their search early Sunday for a Malaysia
Airlines flight that is presumed to have crashed in the Gulf of Thailand
off Vietnam with 239 people aboard, including four that the Malaysian
government said may have boarded with false documents, according to
reports.
In a search operation involving at least a half-dozen nations
that’s now lasted for more than a day, authorities have turned up no
clear signs of wreckage, but Malaysia Airlines said it was “fearing the
worst.”
Graphic
Details about the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777
Video
A search is launched after contact lost with Malaysia Airlines plane en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The information about the suspect passengers has led to
speculation about terrorism and added to the mystery of Malaysia
Airlines Flight MH370, a red-eye carrying passengers from Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, to Beijing that vanished from radar after midnight Saturday
(Friday afternoon EST).
Saturday European officials indicated two
of the people on board were using passports that had been stolen in
Thailand. On Sunday Malaysia’s transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein,
said Malaysian intelligence officials were also checking the identities
of two other passengers, according to The Associated Press.
“All
the four names are with me and have been given to our intelligence
agencies,” Hishammuddin said, according to The AP. “We do not want to
target only the four; we are investigating the whole passenger manifest.
We are looking at all possibilities.”
The mystery deepened on
Sunday as Malaysia said the flight might have turned back from its
scheduled route to Beijing before disappearing.
“What we have done
is actually look into the recording on the radar that we have and we
realized there is a possibility the aircraft did make a turnback,”
Rodzali Daud, the Royal Malaysian Air Force chief, told reporters at a
news conference, according to the Reuters news agency.
Malaysia
said it had now expanded its search to the country’s western coast, the
opposite side of the peninsular from the plane’s last sighting.
The
Vietnamese government said in a statement that two oil slicks spotted
off the southern tip of the country were between six and nine miles long
and were consistent with what would be left by fuel from a crashed jet,
according to the Associated Press.
The National Transportation
Safety Board said Saturday night in Washington that a team of
investigators was en route from the United States to Asia to assist with
the investigation.
As the search resumed Sunday, the airline
posted a notice saying that it was “still unable to detect the
whereabouts of the missing aircraft,” a Boeing 777-200.
The
airline said it would establish a command center either in Kota Bharu,
Malaysia, or Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, as soon as the location of the
aircraft is established. A 94-person caregiver team was providing
emotional support for families, the airline said, and an additional team
was on the way to Beijing.
There was no distress signal from the
plane’s pilots, and crashes usually happen during takeoff or landing.
That heightened concerns about reports that passengers listed in the
airline’s manifest were not on the flight. There were no immediate
reports on whether the suspect passengers were seated with one another.
The
men, one from Italy and the other from Austria, had reported to
authorities that their passports had been stolen in Thailand.
“We are aware of the stolen passport issue and are carrying out an investigation,” Azharuddin told reporters.
Asked
earlier whether terrorism was suspected in the plane’s disappearance,
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said authorities were “looking at
all possibilities, but it is too early to make any conclusive remarks.”
U.S.
officials said Sunday that the cause of the crash remained unclear but
that intelligence agencies were examining the possibility of a
connection to terrorism.
There were no reports of bad weather in the area.
The plane carried passengers from 14 countries, including three Americans, according to the manifest posted on the airline’s Web site. They were identified as Philip Wood, 51, an IBM employee working in Malaysia; Nicole Meng, 4; and Yan Zhang, 2.
In
a brief interview, Wood’s mother, Sondra Wood of Keller, Tex., said she
had received a call from the U.S. Embassy in Malaysia. Her son had just
been in Texas visiting her and her husband, she said, and she knew he
would be on the Malaysia Airlines flight.
“He was a wonderful
person and very intelligent,” she said. “I could talk forever about him.
He’s my son, and any mother would be proud of their son.”
Aside
from his work at IBM, Sondra Wood said, her son loved building
furniture. “He was very artistic,” she said. Philip Wood has two sons,
ages 20 and 24, his mother said.
Austin-based Freescale
Semiconductor confirmed Saturday that 20 of its employees were aboard
the plane. Twelve are from Malaysia and eight are from China, the firm’s
president and chief executive, Gregg Lowe, said in a statement.
“At
present, we are solely focused on our employees and their families,”
Lowe said. “Our thoughts and prayers are with those affected by this
tragic event.”
Vessels and planes from Southeast Asia have been
scouring the waters in the part of the ocean where the oil slicks were
spotted, and Razak said “the search-and-rescue operations will continue
as long as necessary.”
The Philippines and Singapore sent planes
to help in the search, while vessels were dispatched from the
Philippines and China, news agencies reported. Vietnamese fishermen were
also put on alert.
U.S. 7th Fleet officials said in a statement
that the USS Pinckney, a guided-missile destroyer, and a P-3C Orion
aircraft were being sent to help in the search.
Meanwhile, there
were questions about the identities of two passengers after evidence
emerged that they could have been traveling with stolen passports.
Italian
news media had initially listed Luigi Maraldi, 37, among the
passengers, but he reportedly phoned his parents Saturday to say he was
safe in Thailand. His passport had been stolen there last year, the
reports said, and he had been issued new documents.
“One
hypothesis, therefore, is that he was listed because someone boarded the
plane using his stolen passport,” the Corriere della Serra newspaper
reported.
Similarly, Austrian news media reported that an Austrian
citizen had been listed as among the passengers but had been found
safe. His passport was stolen in Thailand two years ago, the Austrian
Foreign Ministry said.
Flight MH370 lost contact with Malaysian
air traffic control at 1:20 a.m. Saturday (12:20 p.m. EST Friday), less
than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur and as it was completing
its ascent. It vanished on the border of the territorial waters of
Malaysia and Vietnam, where the Gulf of Thailand meets the South China
Sea. It had been due to land in Beijing at 6:30 a.m. Saturday (5:30 p.m.
EST Friday).
In Beijing, relatives and friends of those on board
were taken by minibus from the airport to a hotel in the city to wait
for news. Grief was mixed with anger at the lack of information, with
Malaysia Airlines insisting it was still investigating the incident.
Earlier, it had cited speculation that the plane might have landed in
Vietnam, but that was later denied.
The airline said it had sent a
team from Malaysia to the hotel in Beijing to look after the relatives.
It said it would pay for immediate family members of passengers to
gather at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
The plane’s sudden disappearance without a call for help brought back memories of an Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009.
While
some wreckage and bodies were found in subsequent weeks, it took nearly
two years for the main wreckage and the plane’s flight recorders to be
recovered. The final report said that pilot errors in responding to
technical problems led to the crash.
“We are doing everything in
our power to locate the plane. We are doing everything we can to ensure
every possible angle has been addressed,” Malaysian Transport Minister
Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters near the Kuala Lumpur airport,
according to Reuters. “We are looking for accurate information from the
Malaysian military. They are waiting for information from the Vietnamese
side.”
The South China Sea is a tense region of competing territorial claims
among a number of countries, but the plane disappeared well away from
the disputed waters, and countries in the region appeared to put aside
their differences in their search for the plane.
“In times of
emergencies like this, we have to show unity of efforts that transcends
boundaries and issues,” said Lt. Gen. Roy Deveraturda, commander of the
Philippine military’s Western Command, according to the Associated
Press.
Barnes reported from Washington. Harlan reported from Seoul. Liu
Liu, Gu Jinglu and Xu Jing in Beijing and Karen DeYoung and Ian R.
Shapira in Washington contributed to this report.
No comments:
Post a Comment