Family members arrive at a hotel which is prepared for relatives or friends of passengers aboard a missing airplane, in Beijing, China, Sunday, March 9, 2014.KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – Malaysia intelligence agencies are investigating how up to four passengers with suspect identities were able to board the missing Boeing 777 jet, the government said, as planes and ships from across Asia resumed the hunt Sunday for the plane.
There was still no confirmed sighting of wreckage from the Boeing 777 in the seas between Malaysia and Vietnam where it vanished from screens early Saturday morning en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board. The weather was fine, the plane was already cruising and the pilots had no time to send a distress signal – unusual circumstance for a modern jetliner to crash.
On Saturday, the foreign ministries in Italy and Austria said the names of two citizens listed on the flight’s manifest matched the names on two passports reported stolen in Thailand.
This, and the sudden disappearance of the plane that experts say is consistent with a possible onboard explosion, strengthened existing concerns about terrorism as a possible cause for the disappearance. Al-Qaida militants have used similar tactics to try and disguise their identities.
On Sunday, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said that authorities were now looking at four possible cases of suspect identities. He said Malaysian intelligence agencies were in contact with their international counterparts, including the FBI.