Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Lazyness or Indifference may have contributed to the Ill-fated Malaysia Airline Flight

Interpol knew about stolen passports that two passengers used to board an ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight bound for China, but no authorities checked the police agency’s vast database on stolen documents beforehand, it said Sunday.
The failure to use the Interpol information highlights a gaping loophole in global cooperation against one of the world’s biggest but most unrecognized security threats today. 
It’s not known whether stolen passports had anything to do with Saturday’s disappearance of the Boeing 777 bound from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board. But such oversights aren’t new — and the case points to a little-known threat to security. Interpol officials said they hope national authorities will ‘‘learn from the tragedy.’’
Two passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft 
were traveling on the stolen passports of Italian citizen 
Luigi Maraldi (pictured) and an Austrian citizen.
More than 1 billion times last year, travelers boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol’s database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, according to the Lyon-based international organization. 
Interpol has made warnings about the issue for years, and just last month bemoaned that ‘‘only a handful of countries’’ regularly use its stolen or lost travel documents database of records from 167 countries. For example, the database was searched more than 800 million times last year — but one in eight searches was conducted by United Arab Emirates alone. 
On Sunday, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said his organization has long asked why countries would ‘‘wait for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates.’’
Read the rest of the story HERE and view a related video below:



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