Interpol: More "Suspect Passports" On Malaysian Flight Than At First Thought

This is all via @rdbrewer4.

An Interpol spokeswoman said a check of all documents used to board the plane had revealed more "suspect passports" that were being further investigated.

In addition to the two they've Reuters:

"The fact that we are unable to find any debris so far appears to indicate that the aircraft is likely to have disintegrated at around 35,000 feet," said the source, who is involved in the preliminary investigations in Malaysia.

More of the story (most of which you probably already know) here.

The state-run Thanh Nien newspaper cited Lt. Gen. Vo Van Tuan, deputy chief of staff of Vietnam's army, as saying searchers in a low-flying plane had spotted an object suspected of being a door from the missing jet. It was found in waters about 56 miles south of Tho Chu island, in the same area where oil slicks were spotted Saturday.

"From this object, hopefully (we) will find the missing plane," Tuan said. Thanh Nien said two ships from the maritime police were heading to the site.

An authority told Reuters that it was too dark to be certain the object was part of the missing plane, and that more aircraft would be dispatched to investigate the site in waters off southern Vietnam in the morning.

Possibly a terrorist attack, though so little is known now this is speculation:

[A] former intelligence official told Fox News that the information about stolen passports from two adjacent European countries, combined with recent warnings for flights to the United States about the risk of possible shoe bomb attacks, is concerning

Those passports were from Italy and Austria, and were stolen in Thailand.

As you know, as of this moment, the plane is flat-out vanished. As remarkable as it seems, there is a precedent for that:

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.

A plane is at its safest point when it is cruising.

posted by Ace at 05:58 PM

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