Stolen passports expose weakness in Malaysia Airlines security
TU THANH HA
The Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Mar. 09 2014, 3:47 PM EDT
Two days before Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370’s departure and disappearance, two men booked seats aboard the flight, paying in Thai currency and picking up the consecutively numbered tickets in the beach resort of Pattaya in Thailand.
Neither traveller was who he claimed to be. They used passports stolen from European vacationers in Thailand, exposing a lingering weakness in post-Sept. 11, 2001 airline security.
Furthermore, the duo travelled in a fashion that, according to security consultant Chris Mathers, didn’t match the typical use of bogus travel documents.
“There’s a whole bunch of issues with this story that are unusual,” said Mr. Mathers, who has investigated many cases that involved stolen passports while he was an RCMP officer.
The head of Interpol warned that last year, passengers boarded planes more than a billion times without having their passports checked against his agency’s database of stolen or lost passports.
“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,” Interpol secretary-general Ronald Noble said Sunday.
One of the purloined passports belonged to a 30-year-old Austrian, Christian Kozel, whose passport was stolen in 2012 while he was on a flight from Phuket to Bangkok.
The other travel document was stolen from Luigi Maraldi, a 37-year-old Italian. He has said that his passport was snatched last year in Phuket.
Agence France-Presse, based on what it said was booking information it had seen, reported that two men pretending to be Mr. Maraldi and Mr. Kozel booked tickets through China Southern Airlines, which codeshares Flight MH370 with Malaysia Airlines.
Both were supposed to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. They were then supposed to board a KLM flight to Amsterdam, where the bogus Mr. Maraldi would have gone to Copenhagen while the fake Mr. Kozel would have flown to Frankfurt.
Because they are hard to doctor, stolen passports are typically used once, Mr. Mathers noted. Here, instead of booking a direct flight to Amsterdam, the two travellers reserved a circuitous route.
In recent years, human smugglers have flown scores of illegal migrants to Canada by having them pose as travellers from other Asian countries, such as Taiwan or Hong Kong. It is, however, rare for passports with Western names to be used directly for travel, Mr. Mathers said.
“It is possible that it’s a coincidence,” he said. The aim of the two suspicious passengers might simply have been to get out of Malaysia. “People who use stolen passports are typically criminals who can’t use their own names.”
More often, stolen documents are doctored and used to create another set of papers. Fraud is also harder, Mr. Mathers said, with many countries adopting new passport features that make forgery more difficult.
Still, the scope of the problem is gargantuan.
About 65,000 Canadian passports are lost or stolen each year, said John Price, a Passport Canada spokesman. Once reported missing, the passports are cancelled and the information is put into the Canadian Police Information Centre database to minimize fraudulent use of them, Mr. Price said.
Interpol has 40 million entries in its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database. Mr. Noble said only a handful of countries are consistently checking Interpol’s records.
He praised the United States, which searches the database more than 250 million times each year, Britain, with 120 million searches, and the United Arab Emirates, with more than 50 million annual checks.
“If Malaysia Airways and all airlines worldwide were able to check the passport details of prospective passengers against Interpol’s database, then we would not have to speculate whether stolen passports were used by terrorists to board MH370,” Mr. Noble said.