International Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight: Stolen Passports Deepen Mystery

U.S. officials are working to find out as much as possible about two apparently stolen passports connected with the missing Malaysia Airlines jet that vanished this morning near Vietnam.

Confirmation of the safety of two passengers, one Italian and one Austrian national, whose names appeared on the plane's passenger manifest but were not in fact on board the flight, has added to the mystery surrounding missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which was carrying 239 people.

The fact that there were apparently two males on board the flight posing as an Austrian and an Italian is tantalizing and suspicious, and could be meaningful, or it could have nothing at all to do with what happened to the plane, sources said.

Flight path of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 from
Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China.

Families Angry and Agonized During Wait for Missing Plane

An Austrian Foreign Ministry press spokesperson confirmed via Twitter today that the Austrian passenger supposedly on the flight was in fact "safe and sound in Austria," and had his passport stolen in 2012.

Meanwhile, an Italian Foreign Ministry press office official told ABC News that no Italian was on the plane. The parents of Italian Luigi Maraldi, whose name is also on the passenger manifest, told Italian TV station RAI that their son had called them early this morning from Thailand where he is vacationing. Maraldi's passport was stolen about a year ago while he was on vacation in Thailand, his parents said.

Official sources told ABC News today they are investigating the two stolen passports and hoping that the Malaysian airport has security cameras that recorded passengers headed to the flight. Those images can be compared to various databases, provided they exist and the Malaysians will share them.

The U.S. government is also planning to review all the names of passengers and crew on the flight manifest, sources said. The names, which are available through open source, will be run through all relevant terrorism and criminal databases the government has access to. A formal request may have already been made through the TSA or State Department, one official said.

U.S. officials emphasized that there is no evidence of terrorism, but it is conducting the review to check for any potential leads. They are not ruling anything out at this stage, especially considering so few facts have been revealed in the case and no wreckage has been recovered, sources said.

Authorities volunteered tonight that stolen passports and counterfeit passports are often used for drug smuggling in that area of the world.

Meanwhile, a massive search and rescue operation is currently under way for the Boeing 777-200 aircraft, more than 24 hours after air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane.

Boeing 777: 1 of the Most Popular, Safest Jets

A spokesman for Malaysia Airlines said Friday that the passengers included travelers from America, Canada, Britain, Australia, France, India, the Netherlands, Russia and several other countries.

"An international search and rescue mission from Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam was mobilized this morning. At this stage, they have failed to find evidence of any wreckage. The sea mission will continue overnight while the air mission will recommence at daylight," Malaysia Airlines said in a statement posted on its website at 2 a.m. local time Sunday.

The three Americans on board the Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing in Southeast Asia have been identified as Philip Wood, 51; Nicolechd Meng, 4; and Yan Zhang, 2, according to the flight's manifest.

The Vietnamese government reported today that air force pilots spotted large oil slicks off the country's southern coast, according to The Associated Press. There was no confirmation that the slicks were related to the missing plane, but the statement said the slicks were consistent with the kinds expected to be left by a crashed jetliner.

China has dispatched two maritime rescue ships and the Philippines deployed three air force planes and three navy patrol ships to help. The Navy's USS Pinckney is also on its way to help the search effort, the 7th Fleet announced on Twitter this morning.

Flight MH370 departed Kuala Lumpur at 12:55 a.m. local time Saturday, and was scheduled to land in Beijing at 6:30 a.m., the airline said. It went missing two hours into the flight and disappeared off the radar.

The plane's route would take the aircraft from Malaysia across to Vietnam and China. Vietnam said on its official website that its air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane "in Ca Mau province airspace before it had entered contact with Ho Chi Minh City air traffic control." Ca Mau is near the southern tip of Vietnam.

The plane was meant to transfer to Ho Chi Minh City air traffic control at 1722 GMT but never appeared, the statement said, citing a senior Ministry of Defense official.

Malaysia's defense minister told a news conference, "We are trying to do everything in our power to [determine] where the plane is."

Malaysia Airlines said the captain of the airliner, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was an experienced 53-year-old pilot who had 18,365 hours of flying since joining the airline in 1981. The first officer on the flight was identified as Fariq Hamid, 27, and had about 2,800 flight hours since 2007.

Meanwhile, the flight information board at the airport in Beijing indicated the flight was delayed.

An airport official wrote on a white board near the arrivals customer service desk that families of the missing passengers should go to the Lido Hotel. The notice was put up about four hours after the plane was overdue.

"Friends and families should go to the Lido Hotel for more information," Eric Yangchao, customer service representative for Beijing International Airport, told ABC News. Family members took a shuttle bus to the hotel.

In a statement on Twitter, Boeing said it was watching the situation closely. The Malaysian aircraft, a Boeing 777-200, is 11 years and 10 months old. The 777 model had not had a fatal crash in its 20-year history until the Asiana crash in San Francisco in July 2013.

ABC News' and Joohee Cho contributed to this report.

Missing Malaysian Plane Draws Comparison to Doomed Air France Flight

As ships and aircraft search thousands of square miles for a missing Malaysian Airlines jetliner, officials are trying to understand how the Boeing 777 could have apparently dropped out of the sky without warning or distress signal.

The mysterious lack of contact and the fact that the plane disappeared from radar midflight is so rare that it brings to mind only one other plane disaster in recent years, the doomed 2009 Air France flight 447.

The Air France flight, an Airbus A330, from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed in the Atlantic midway through the flight without sending a distress signal. All 228 aboard were killed.

Get the Latest News on the Missing Malaysian Flight

It took three years for investigators to piece together what led to the crash, with two years spent just trying to find the black box data recorders on board. In 2012 the French government's official accident investigators, the BEA, released their final report, which found that the flight crashed due to a combination of technical failures and pilot error.

The BEA found that a speed sensor on board the plane, called a pitot tube, stopped functioning after becoming clogged with ice at high-altitude while the plane was flying through a thunderstorm.

As a result, the auto-pilot disengaged and shifted the controls back to the pilots. As they flew in heavy turbulence the Air France pilots failed to properly diagnose the severity of the problem because the pitot tube, a critical piece of equipment to the aircraft, was sending inaccurate data to the cockpit, the report said.

"Despite these persistent symptoms, the crew never understood that they were stalling and consequently never applied a recovery maneuver," the 2012 report said.

When the auto-pilot was disengaged, a co-pilot pulled the nose of the plane, which led to aerodynamic stall. From the first stall warning at 2:10 a.m. to when the plane crashed four minutes later, the pilots never sent a distress signal as they frantically tried to save the plane.

According to the black box recordings, the pilots appeared unaware they were going to crash until the final seconds before hitting the water.

Find Out More About Air France Flight 447

"Our investigation is a no-blame investigation. It is just a safety investigation," Jean-Paul Troadec, the director of BEA, told ABC News in a 2012 interview. "What appears in the crew behavior is that most probably, a different crew would have done the same action. So, we cannot blame this crew. What we can say is that most probably this crew and most crews were not prepared to face such an event."

ABC News' Matt Hosford, Lauren Effron and Nikki Batiste contributed to this report.

New Futuristic Tuk-Tuks Arrive on the Streets of Phnom Penh

By Emily Wilkins and Sek Odom | February 19, 2014

Most tuk-tuk drivers have to continuously vie with each other to attract tourists’ attention, but Oung Hour gets it without even trying.
As he stands on the sidewalk near the riverside, groups of tourists point at his bright mustard-yellow tuk-tuk, its smooth fiberglass body shaped like a jellybean—a slick, sci-fi-like model that’s a far cry from the traditional wooden kind.

The rounded tuk-tuks arrived in Phnom Penh in November via Bruno Brunner, a Swiss national who runs a motorcycle rental business.
“The tuk-tuks are modern and fit for 2014,” Mr. Brunner said. “And the passengers love this tuk-tuk.”
The new look is the most recent change for the ubiquitous Phnom Penh tuk-tuk, of which there are now more than 600,000 in the city, according to the Independence Democratic of Informal Economic Association (IDEA), a union that represents tuk-tuk drivers among other members.
Initially influenced by Chinese rickshaws, the carts first came to Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge era, said Samnang Pok, president of the Cambodia Tourist Guide Association. In 1980, the carts returned as trailers, five meters long and able to shuttle 20 to 30 people as well as their goods.
The long trailers were difficult to integrate into crowded city streets, however, said Heng Samon, secretary-general of IDEA.
“The trailers caused traffic jams in the city, then the traffic laws did not allow trailers to go in the city,” Mr. Samon said.
The solution to clogged streets came around 2000. With an influx of tourists, Cambodians in Siem Reap, influenced by Thailand’s tuk-tuks, built the modern, shorter motorcycle-pulled rickshaws with cushioned seats.
“They brought tourists around Siem Reap and the Angkor area,” Mr. Pok said. “They saw more and more people were interested, and then people began using them more and more.”
They are now an integral part of Phnom Penh—no tourists, or residents, can stroll through the city without hearing cries of “tuk-tuk”—much to the consternation of many pedestrians.
The word itself is still up for debate, however.
“We call it motor tricycles,” said Prak Vuthy, chief of marketing to Asean countries at the Ministry of Tourism, noting that the word ‘tuk-tuk’ comes from Thailand.
Mr. Pok of the tourist association said his name of choice was “remorque,” a French word that was at one point widely used to refer to tuk-tuks.
Yet others defend the word ‘tuk-tuk,’ saying that it is onomatopoeic and mimics the sounds a tuk-tuk makes as it travels.
Mr. Brunner has no problem calling his creation a tuk-tuk. He’s protective of his business as well —despite interested buyers, he is only renting out the tuk-tuks at $80 a month, $30 if they have advertisements on them.
Pheap Phop, who has been driving around his new bean-shaped carriage for more than three months, has not seen any substantial profit compared to his old wooden tuk-tuk, which he bought for $800. But his purple tuk-tuk covered in ads for Ezecom costs him a dollar a day to rent, so he is satisfied to embrace the contemporary look.
“I did not have to spend a lot,” Mr. Phop said. “This tuk-tuk gets more attention from the tourists.”

© 2014, The Cambodia Daily. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced in print, electronically, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without written permission.

RCAF in Africa; Fears of Drug Resistant Malaria

By Denise Hruby | March 1, 2014

The 74 Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) soldiers who departed for a U.N. peacekeeping mission to Mali this week were only the latest batch of troops to bring their engineering and demining expertise to Africa.
Such skills, particularly demining abilities, are increasingly valued by the U.N. in post-conflict nations, particularly in Africa.

But, alongside their expertise, Cambodian troops also run the danger of bringing something unwanted to Africa: drug-resistant malaria.
“We assume that if a [soldier] is positive and goes to Africa and carries the Cambodian parasite…it’s a very big challenge,” Dr. Siv Sovannaroth, head of the National Malaria Center’s (CNM) technical office, said this week.
Resistance to artemisinin, the only drug used to treat malaria in Africa, was first found along the Cambodian-Thai border in 2008, and has since been reported in areas of Vietnam, Burma and Laos.
If drug resistance spreads to Africa, it could be a catastrophe, as 85 percent of all the world’s malaria cases occur in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
“If resistance were to spread to—or emerge in—India or sub-Saharan Africa, the public health consequences could be dire, as no alternative antimalarial medicine is available at present with the same level of efficacy and tolerability as ACTs” (artemisinin combination therapy), the WHO said.
In Mali alone, 2,171,739 cases of malaria were reported in 2012. The majority of those people survived after receiving ACTs.
In Cambodia, however, ACTs fail in about 30 percent of malaria cases in Pailin, Battambang, Pursat and Oddar Meanchey provinces, Dr. Sovannaroth said.
“We have switched to use Malarone in those provinces. But one dose of malarone costs $50, and ACTs cost only $1.50 per dose. Malaria also develops quick resistance to Malarone, and in Africa, there are so many cases, you can’t use it,” he said.
To prevent the possibility that a Cambodian soldier introduces artemisinin-resistant malaria to Africa, the Ministry of Defense and the CNM have discussed screening RCAF soldiers for malaria before deploying them on U.N. missions, Dr. Sovannaroth said.
Screening the soldiers, he said, would ensure that asymptomatic cases, which may or may not show artemisinin-resistance, are detected. According to the WHO, asymptomatic infections occur in malaria-endemic areas where persons can develop partial immunity due to the frequency of mosquito bites.
However, according to the Ministry of Defense, none of the total of 309 RCAF soldiers deployed to Mali between February and March have or will be screened for malaria parasites, said Dr. Ly Sokhey, a technical officer with the Ministry of Defense’s health department.
“Until now, we haven’t done this yet because we are still waiting for approval from the Minister [of Defense, General Tea Banh],” he said.
“We created the framework [for testing] a year ago…I don’t know why it hasn’t been approved yet,” Dr. Sokhey said.
Of the hundreds of peacekeepers Cambodia has sent to countries such as Chad, Sudan and Lebanon since participation in U.N. peacekeeping missions started in 2005, none has been screened for malaria, he added.
“We have sent military forces to Africa many times, but none of them were screened for diseases like malaria. We just screen them for hepatitis or TB,” Dr. Sokhey said.
More than 60 years ago, the malaria parasite developed a resistance against the drug called chloroquine, then used around the globe to treat malaria.
Then too, resistance to chloroquine was also found to have originated along the Cambodian-Thai border, from where it quickly spread across the world until the drug had to be deemed useless.
Sonny Krishnan, communications officer at the WHO’s regional office for emergency response to artemisinin resistance, said that so far, the government has not asked the WHO for help in screening soldiers for malaria.
The parasite, he said, uses both mosquitoes and humans as vectors, and could therefore easily cross long distances if carried by humans.
“The scenario is basically that somebody is asymptomatic, so doesn’t show clinical symptoms of malaria. That means they have the parasite in their blood, but very low loads, so you are basically a walking reservoir, and if you travel a long distance, you carry the parasite with you,” Mr. Krishnan said.
Although the WHO created a regional malaria hub in Phnom Penh last year to respond to artemisinin resistance and contain the spread within the region, a single traveler could quickly take a resistant strain across borders, Mr. Krishnan said.
“It is really important to properly screen people if they are traveling, because they could have low levels of the parasite,” Mr. Krishnan said.
The WHO said that it would assist RCAF with screenings if asked for help, but referred questions on health screenings for peacekeepers to the U.N.’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations in the U.S., which did not reply to a request for comment.
The U.N. has already been accused of bringing more than peacekeepers and assistance on its overseas missions.
In October, human rights lawyers in the U.S. filed a complaint against the U.N. for introducing cholera to Haiti, after peacekeepers from Nepal were deployed there to help in the aftermath of a devastating 2010 earthquake.
Of the more than 650,000 people who contracted the disease, 8,300 Haitians died.
The U.N. has claimed it has legal immunity from claims for compensation in Haiti.
(Additional reporting by Saing Soenthrith)

© 2014, The Cambodia Daily. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced in print, electronically, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without written permission.