FEARS that a missing airliner carrying 239 people could have been blown up by suicide bombers travelling on stolen passports increased last night.
Two men from Austria and Italy, listed among the passengers on a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, were not on board, officials in both European countries said on Saturday, and at least one of them had had his passport stolen.
The revelation came as distraught relatives were told search aircraft had spotted two oil slicks in the South China Sea shortly before night fell.
Officials said the size and shape of the slicks were consistent with damaged aircraft fuel tanks.
A passenger manifest issued by Malaysia Airlines after its plane went missing yesterday included Christian Kozel, 30, from Austria, and Luigi Maraldi, 37, from Italy.
But a foreign ministry spokesman in Vienna said the Austrian national was safe at home.
He said: “Our embassy got the information that there was an Austrian on board. That was the passenger list from Malaysia Airlines. Our system came back with a note that this is a stolen passport.”
The foreign ministry in Rome said no Italian was on the plane either, despite the inclusion of Mr Maraldi’s name on the list.
Newspaper Corriere Della Sera reported that his passport was stolen in Thailand last August. The police could not confirm press reports that it had been registered as lost or stolen there, as they said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was responsible for thefts abroad.
The Austrian Foreign Ministry spokesman said: “It’s interesting that there were two cases on the same plane but we just know that our Austrian was not on board.
“Someone used a document to get on the plane. But whoever used that, we have nothing to say about that, we don’t know, that would be for the authorities to look into.”
As the mystery deepened, the search for Flight MH370 across 4,000 square miles of open water continued after the aircraft disappeared from radar screens less than an hour after taking off from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing.
There was no distress signal as the plane, cruising at 35,000ft and manned by experienced aircrew, suddenly disappeared.
The lack of any news added to the tension at Kuala Lumpur and Beijing airports as distraught relatives arrived.
Of the 227 passengers and 12 crew, 152 were Chinese, 38 from Malaysia, seven from Indonesia, six from Australia, five from India, three from the United States and others from Indonesia, France, New Zealand, Canada, Ukraine, Russia, Italy, Taiwan, the Netherlands and Austria. Two of the passengers were infants.
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