Stolen Passport on Malaysia Flight Used by Black Man, Official Indicates
Published at
LE QUANG NHAT/AFP/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — One of the passengers who used a stolen passport to board the missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jet was a black man, a Malaysian official indicated on Monday.
The investigation into Friday’s disappearance of the jetliner with 239 passengers and crew members 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.
On Monday, 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, “Do you know a footballer by the name of Bartoli? Do you know what he looks like?”
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 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 Monday, 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. 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 Monday.
The U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet is using a P-3C Orion marine surveillance aircraft to search in the northern section of the Strait of Malacca Monday, according to the group’s Facebook page.
Copyright 2014 ABC News Radio