WATCH: New clues may explain what happened to missing Malaysian airlines flight. Mike Drolet explains
TORONTO – As authorities continue to search for answers behind the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, the world’s international law enforcement agency is taking the world’s airline industry to task for failing to adequately screen passports.
VIDEO GALLERY: The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370
In a statement released Sunday evening, almost two days since air-traffic controllers lost contact with the Beijing-bound flight shortly after it left Kuala Lumpur, INTERPOL questioned how two individuals used stolen passports to board Flight MH370.
“This is a situation we had hoped never to see. For years INTERPOL has asked why should countries wait for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates,” said the agency’s secretary general, Ronald K. Noble.
Both passports — one belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel and the other to Luigi Maraldi of Italy — were entered into INTERPOL’s database after they were stolen in Thailand, the police body said. Kozel’s passport was stolen in 2012 and Maraldi’s last July.
INTERPOL says that not only did Malaysia Airlines fail to check the two stolen passports, no other checks of the passports were made since they were reported stolen and logged into its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD) database.
This, the agency says, raises the question of whether the stolen passports were used to board other flights in the past.
The discovery that unknown persons were able to board the Malaysia Airlines flight without scrutiny has fueled speculation that a terrorist hijacking may be linked to the disappearance of the Boeing 777 – a plane renowned for its safety record.
Though the identities — and intentions — of the mystery passengers have yet to be determined, Noble blasted the airliner for failing to remove the possibility of terrorism from an already long list of grim outcomes.
“If Malaysia Airlines 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,” said Secretary General Noble.
“We would know that stolen passports were not used by any of the passengers to board that flight.”
Over a billion passenger entries went unscreened in 2013: INTERPOL
Though the release singled out Malaysia Airlines for its lack of oversight, it also revealed some troubling details about the airline industry as a whole.
According to INTERPOL, its SLTD database has logged more than 40 million unique entries since its creation in 2002, and has received as many as 800 million searches per year.
However, a more granular breakdown of the numbers shows that a minority of countries seem to represent an enormous amount of the aforementioned 800 million queries.
For example, the United States makes around 250 million searches annually; the United Kingdom 120 million; the UAE 50 million.
By contrast, INTERPOL says that the average yearly search by member countries is just 60,000.
When asked how many times per year Malaysia and Canada make use of the database, INTERPOL ‘s press office advised Global News to contact national authorities directly.
With files from The Canadian Press
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