Amid the multitude of questions about the fate of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, one small part of the story became clearer Tuesday when police said they have identified one of the passengers who used a stolen passport to board the plane. And it's unlikely, they said, that he was part of a terrorist group.
He is a 19-year-old
Iranian man, named Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, who was believed to be trying
to emigrate to Germany, said Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar of the Royal
Malaysian Police.
The use of the stolen
passports by two passengers on the plane, which vanished from the skies early
Saturday, raised fears that its disappearance could be linked to terrorism.
But Malaysian
authorities don't think the young Iranian posed a threat.
"We have been
checking his background. We have also checked him with other police
organizations of his profile and we believe that he is not likely to be a
member of any terrorist group," Khalid said.
After he failed to
arrive in Frankfurt, the final destination of his ticket, his mother contacted
authorities, Khalid said. According to ticketing records, the ticket to
Frankfurt was booked under a stolen Austrian passport.
Authorities are still
investigating the identity of another passenger who used a stolen Italian
passport.
The identification of
one of the men helps peel away a thin layer of the mystery surrounding the
passenger jet, which disappeared about an hour into its flight from Kuala
Lumpur to Beijing.
But in the bigger
puzzle of the missing plane's whereabouts, there were no reports of progress
Tuesday.
Every lead that has
raised hopes of tracing the commercial jet and the 239 people on board has so
far petered out.
"Time is passing
by," a middle-aged man shouted at an airline agent in Beijing on Tuesday.
His son, he said, was one of the passengers aboard the plane.
Most of those on the
flight were Chinese. And for their family members, the wait has been agonizing.
There were also three
U.S. citizens on the plane, including Philip Wood.
"As of yet, we
know as much as everyone else," Wood's brother, Tom, told CNN's
"AC360" Monday. "It seems to be getting more bizarre, the twists
in the story, where they can't find anything. So we're just relying on faith."
The challenge facing
those involved in the huge, multinational search is daunting; the area of sea
they are combing is vast.
And they still don't
know if they're looking in the right place.
"As we enter
into Day 4, the aircraft is yet to be found," Malaysia Airlines said in a
statement Tuesday.
Days, weeks
or even months
Over the past few
days, search teams have been scouring tens of thousands of square miles of sea
around the area where the plane was last detected, between the northeast coast
of Malaysia and southwest Vietnam.
They have also been
searching off the west coast of the Malaysian Peninsula, in the Strait of
Malacca, and north into the Andaman Sea. The airline said Tuesday that
authorities are still investigating the possibility that the plane might have
tried to turn back toward Kuala Lumpur.
The search also
encompasses the land in between the two areas of sea.
But it could be days,
weeks or even months before the searchers find anything that begins to explain
what happened to the plane, which disappeared early Saturday en route to
Beijing.
In the case of Air
France Flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic in 2009, it took five
days just to locate the first floating wreckage.
And it was nearly two
years before investigators found the bulk of the French plane's wreckage, and
the majority of the bodies of the 228 people on board, about 12,000 feet below
the surface of the ocean.
The Gulf of Thailand,
the area where the missing Malaysian plane was last detected is much shallower,
with a maximum depth of only 260 feet and an average depth of about 150 feet.
"If the aircraft
is in the water, it should make recovery easier than the long and expensive
effort to bring up key parts of the Air France plane," Bill Palmer, an
Airbus A330 captain for a major airline, wrote
in an opinion article for CNN.
But if Flight 370
went down farther west, it could have ended up in the much deeper waters of the
Andaman Sea.
No
possibilities ruled out
Aviation officials
say they haven't ruled out any possibilities in the investigation so far. It's
hard for them to reach any conclusions until they find the plane, along with
its voice and data recorders.
Malaysian police are
focusing on four particular areas, Khalid said Tuesday: hijacking, sabotage,
psychological problems of the passengers and crew, and personal problems among
the passengers and crew.
He said police were
going through the profiles of all the passengers and crew members.
Malaysia Airlines
Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told CNN's Jim Clancy that those involved
in the search for the plane are determined to carry on.
"We just have to
be more resolved and pay more attention to every single detail," he said Tuesday.
"It must be there somewhere. We have to find it."
'Crucial
time' passing
But if the plane fell
into the sea, the more time that goes by, the harder the task becomes as ocean
currents move things around.
"Crucial time is
passing," David Gallo, with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told
CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Monday. "That search area -- that haystack -- is
getting bigger and bigger and bigger."
Gallo described what
will happen once some debris from the aircraft is found, though he stressed there's
still no evidence the plane hit the water.
"Once a piece of
the debris is found -- if it did impact on the water -- then you've got to
backtrack that debris to try to find the 'X marks the spot' on where the plane
actually hit the water, because that would be the center of the haystack.
"And in that
haystack you're trying to find bits of that needle -- in fact, in the case of
the flight data recorders, you're looking for a tiny little bit of that
needle," he said.
Technology
put to use
Countries involved in
the search have deployed sophisticated technology to help try to track down the
plane.
China has adjusted
the commands for as many as 10 satellites in orbit so that they can assist with
weather monitoring, communications and other aspects of the search, the Chinese
state news agency Xinhua reported.
And the United States
has put a range of naval technology to use in the search.
That includes a Navy
P-3C Orion aircraft, which can cover about 1,000 to 1,500 square miles every
hour, according to the U.S. Seventh Fleet.
The Orion, which is
focused on the area off the west coast of Malaysia, has sensors that allow the
crew to clearly detect small debris in the water, the fleet said.
CNN aviation
correspondent Richard Quest described the search as "extremely painstaking
work," suggesting a grid would have been drawn over the ocean for teams to
comb bit by bit.
Quest said that the
expanding search area show how little idea rescue officials have of where the
plane might be. But he's still confident they'll find it eventually.
"It's not
hopeless by any means. They will find it.," he said. "They have to.
They have to know what happened."
Source:CNN
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