#MalaysiaAirlines, #MH370, #PrayForMH370
Terrorism possible in missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370; military radar indicates jet may have turned around
The plane —
which had two passengers using stolen passports — vanished off the
Vietnamese coast during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing while
carrying 239 people, including three U.S. passport holders: Philip Wood,
51, Nicole Meng, 4, and Yan Zhang, 2. Malaysia's air force chief said
early Sunday that military radar indicated the missing jet may have
turned back to Kuala Lumpur.
Distraught family members crowd Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia after a jetliner with 239 people onboard vanished from air traffic control screens over waters between Malaysia and Vietnam. |
Authorities hunting a lost Malaysia Airlines jetliner refused to rule
out terrorism Saturday in the flight’s sudden and stunning disappearance
over Southeast Asia.
While a daylong search failed to locate missing Flight MH370 or the 239
passengers and crew members aboard, red flags were raised by word that
two passengers on the doomed plane boarded with stolen passports. As
many as four people may have boarded with false documentation, the Washington Post reported.
The jet vanished during an otherwise routine flight without sending a
distress signal, leading investigators to suspect a quick and
catastrophic midair incident.
Philip Wood of Texas, one of three U.S. passport holders on missing flight MH370. |
Early Sunday morning, Malaysia’s air force chief said that military radar indicated the missing Boeing 777 jet may have turned back to Kuala Lumpur, but declined to give further details on how far the plane may have veered off course. Rodzali Daud said “there is a possible indication that the aircraft made a turnback,” and that authorities were “trying to make sense of that.”
Three of the flight’s passengers carried U.S. travel documents — including two small children, a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old.
View of oil spills seen from a Vietnamese air force plane on Saturday in the search area for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members. REUTERS/Trung Hieu/Thanh Nien Newspaper |
The Boeing 777 was about an hour into its flight early Saturday,
traveling smoothly in clear weather at about 35,000 feet, when it
vanished from radar screens. A desperate international search ensued,
with any hope of good news disappearing almost as quickly as the
11-year-old plane.
The first hints of its likely fate were a pair of massive oil slicks
spotted in the South China Sea. But Vietnamese ships and planes
searching for the missing jet found no wreckage in the vicinity of the
slicks, officials said Saturday night.
Some debris was spotted elsewhere, but it was unclear if it came from
the plane. The search was expanded early Sunday to cover the west coast
of Malaysia, officials said.
Planned route of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. - New York Daily News |
Confirmation that two travelers headed from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing were identity thieves suggested something sinister — although U.S. officials echoed Razak’s caution until more details are known.
“This gets our antenna up, for sure,” said Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. “Once you hear that — stolen passports, a plane disappearing from the radar — you have to go to the full-court press.”
RELATED: ASIANA CRASH VICTIM'S DEATH IN STILL QUESTION
A relative of Norliakmar Hamid and Razahan Zamani, passengers on a missing Malaysia Airlines flight, cries at their house in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday. - MOHD RASFAN/AFP/Getty Images |
A federal law enforcement source said the U.S. was “still monitoring the situation.” King said intelligence agencies around the world would no doubt check
for “communications among terrorists or any type of chatter” about the
flight. But the congressional veteran, along with another federal
source, repeated that the investigation was too fresh to reach any
conclusions.
Recovery of the still-missing Boeing 777, long considered one of the
safest aircraft in the world, is the first step in deciphering what went
wrong near the start of the 2,300-mile trip. The first clues to its
possible whereabouts were the two oil slicks spotted by Vietnamese jet
pilots — a possible sign of leaking jet fuel.
Sarah Nor, 55, the mother of 34-year-old Norliakmar Hamid, a passenger on a missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, is seen here at her home in Kuala Lumpur Saturday. She has received no word on the fate of those onboard.- MOHD RASFAN/AFP/Getty Images |
The plane was inspected just 10 days ago and found “in proper
condition,” said Ignatius Ong, CEO of Malaysia Airlines subsidiary
Firefly.
A team from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board was dispatched to Asia to aid in the investigation.
The three U.S. passport holders were identified in a manifest posted by
Malaysia Airlines as Philip Wood, 51, and the two children, Nicole
Meng, 4, and Yan Zhang, 2.
Members of the Philippine Military Western Command map out search-and-rescue operations for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight. Several Asian countries scrambled air and water teams to comb the South China Sea off southern Vietnam on Saturday. - AFP PHOTO / PHILIPPINE MILITARY WESTERN COMMAND |
Wood, an IBM employee and father of two boys, was based in the
Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. “We’re all sticking together,” his father, Aubrey Wood, told The New York Times. “What can you do? What can you say?”
Wood’s ex-wife, Elaine, originally from the Bronx, described him in a Facebook post as “a wonderful man.”
Twenty employees of an Austin, Tex.-based tech firm were also aboard
the flight. Twelve of the Freescale Semiconductor employees are from
Malaysia and eight from China, company officials said.
This 2011 photo shows the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared from air traffic control screens Saturday. The image was taken at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport in France.- Laurent Errera/AP |
Officials in Italy and Austria confirmed Saturday that the names of two
passengers on the flight manifest matched passports reported stolen in
Thailand. The Italian passport was swiped 18 months ago, while the
Austrian travel document disappeared two years ago, officials said.
Italian Luigi Maraldi, 37, is now living in Thailand, while the
Austrian was located in his homeland. Maraldi called his parents in
Italy to reassure them of his safety after his name appeared on the
flight manifest.
The U.S. Navy dispatched a warship and a surveillance plane to join the
multinational search team that failed to turn up any wreckage across 17
fruitless hours before nightfall in Southeast Asia. Malaysia sent 15 planes and nine ships, while Vietnam sent two navy boats, two jets and a helicopter.
A woman, whose husband was a passenger of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, attempts to leave a Beijing hotel after complaining that the airline was withholding information.- JASON LEE/Reuters |
The twin jets spotted the slicks in the South China Sea; one was about 9
miles long, and the other about 6 miles long, officials said. Each was
consistent with the residue of a crash by a jetliner with two fuel
tanks, authorities confirmed.
“We are doing everything in our power to locate the plane,” said
Malaysia Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein at the Kuala Lumpur
International Airport.
About two-thirds of the likely crash victims were from Taiwan and
China, with distraught family members at the Beijing airport steered to a
nearby hotel to await the expected delivery of grim news. One woman,
boarding a shuttle bus, wept as she spoke on a cell phone. “They want us
to go to the hotel. It cannot be good,” she said. With News Wire Services
No comments:
Post a Comment