Two men who used stolen passports to board the missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jet have been isolated on surveillance video, officials said today.
The investigation into the disappearance of the jetliner with 239
passengers and crew has centered so far around the fact that two
passengers used passports stolen from an Austrian and an Italian. The
plane which left Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was headed for Beijing. Three
of the passengers, one adult and two children, were American.
Today Malaysia's Civil Aviation Chief Azaharuddin Abdul Rahman said
officials had reviewed surveillance tape of the plane's boarding "from
check-in right to departure."
"I can confirm that all security protocols had been complied with," he said.
When asked about the two men who used the stolen passports, Rahman replied, "We confirmed now they are not Asian looking males."
When pressed to describe them, he said indicated that one of the men is black.
Do you know a footballer by the name of Bartoli? Do you know what he looks like?" Rahman asked.
Reporters corrected him asking, "Mario Balotelli?" and asked whether the
man with the stolen passport was black. Balotelli, who is black, is an
Italian soccer player.
"Yes," Rahman replied.
Rahman refused to further describe the two men.
Rahman also indicated that investigators were not any closer to
determining what happened to the Boeing 777 jet, a plane with an
excellent safety record, or where the plane was. Samples from an oil
slick off the southern coast of Vietnam determined it was not from the
plane.
And Vietnam’s National Committee for Search and Rescue told ABC New that
an orange object spotted floating in the ocean over the weekend
originally thought to be a life raft from the plane had nothing to do
with the plane wreckage,
During an earlier press briefing today, a reporter asked Malaysia's
Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein about reports that a media
personality received an open letter from the leader of Chinese Martyr
Brigade claiming responsibility for the incident. When asked about the
letter, a Malaysian official said, "Yes, there is sound ground to say it
is true, but again, we have said from the beginning that we are not
taking anything for granted."
But at the later news conference, Rahman said, "We don’t know what
happened to the aircraft, so we cannot speculate... We cannot do guess
work."
He said the search area was being expanded to include an additional
expanse of ocean as well as land at the northern tip of Malaysia. The
search grid was divided into boxes with individual ships assigned to
each box. It was now nighttime in Asia, which brought a search by air to
a halt. But he said planes would resume crisscrossing the search grid
for signs of the plane at daybreak.
Dozens of aircraft and ships have contributed to the search, including
crews from Vietnam, China, Singapore, Indonesia, the United States,
Thailand, Australia and the Philippines, Rahman said at a press
conference today.
