The discovery of two passengers aboard missing Malaysian Airline System Bhd Flight 370 has roused concerns on whether it was the lead that had caused such act of terrorism. The Boeing Co. 777-200 airplane was deemed missing on March 8 when it failed to arrive at its scheduled arrival in Beijing, China, Bloomberg said. The issue also led pundits to compare recent events to that of the September 11 attacks, the news agency said.
The stolen passports were reportedly owned by Austrian and Italian citizens. Today, Malaysia had identified one of the two passengers who had pretended to be either of the two male individuals whose credentials were stolen.
In a mobile phone text message, Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar said, "We are trying to ascertain if the two holders of false passports entered Malaysia, legally or illegally." He refused to provide additional details, Bloomberg said.
The lack of consistent airport measures execution is seen as the main culprit why two people who pretended to be the people from the stolen passports were able to go through security and board the missing plan. International police agency Interpol has said that over 40 million passports had been listed according to a special database, and that majority of them boarded planes over a billion times in 2013 due to the fact that authorities failed to screen them against the agency's register.
Head Rohan Gunaratna of the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies' International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore saw the security lapse as a wake-up call for governments to act upon such security lapses. He told Bloomberg, "Certainly Malaysia should have checked the existing Interpol database of lost and stolen passports. It should be mandatory for governments to input all lost and stolen passports and it should also become mandatory for all immigration and security agencies to screen all passengers against it."
