Malaysian police said Tuesday that one of the passengers who used a stolen passport to board a Malaysian Airlines flight that disappeared early Saturday morning was an Iranian man seeking asylum in Europe.
Police chief Tan Sri Khalid Tan Sri said Tuesday that the man, whom the BBC identified as 19-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, was not believed to be a member of a terrorist group. Sri says Mehrdad was believed to be planning to reach Germany, and added that the second passenger using a stolen passport has not been identified.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished from radar screens early Saturday local time with 239 people on board, shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur. In the absence of any sign that the plane was in trouble before it vanished, speculation has ranged widely, including pilot error, plane malfunction, hijacking and terrorism. The last theory had focused on the reports that two stolen passports had been used by passengers on the plane.
However, late Monday, the BBC's Persian service reported that both men who bought the stolen passports were Iranians who planned to use them to migrate to Europe. The report cited a friend of both men who hosted them at his home in Kuala Lumpur as they prepared to travel to Beijing, the final destination of the flight.
Over the weekend, the passports were identified as belonging to 30-year-old Austrian Christian Kozel and 37-year-old Italian Luigi Maraldi. Both men had reported that their passports had been stolen while they were traveling in Thailand. The BBC reported that the Iranians bought the passports in Kuala Lumpur and planned to travel on to Amsterdam from Beijing. Once in Amsterdam, the man presumed to be Mehrdad planned to travel to Frankfurt, Germany, while the other planned to go to Copenhagen, Denmark.
It was not made immediately clear how the passports were sent from Thailand to Kuala Lumpur.
A BBC Persian editor told Britain's Daily Telegraph that the Iranians were 'looking for a place to settle.' Both Malaysia and Thailand are home to large Iranian communities.
Click for more from The Daily Telegraph bberitaa.blogspot.com contributed to this report.
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, March 11, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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