MH370: Stolen passports and immigration control at KLIA

Whilst the fate of flight MH370 still remains unknown (as of GMT 1130 as I am writing this), I am going to pick up on one line of inquiry that the media has latched onto. Two passengers on this ill-fated flight had been traveling on passports that have been reported stolen last year in Thailand. The passports belonged to Italian Luigi Maraldi and Austrian Christian Kozel. CCTV of the men who used those passports to get through immigration showed that they were obviously of Asian appearance. This has prompted Malaysian Home Minister to criticize border officials at KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport) who let them through, "I am still perturbed. Can't these immigration officials think? Italian and Austrian but with Asian faces," he was quoted as saying late on Sunday."  Update (GMT 1830): It has now been revealed that one of the men traveling on the stolen passports is in fact black (African, resembling footballer Mario Balotelli) and not Asian, but I am not going edit the bulk of this article.

Allow me to follow through with this as there are many angry responses on Reuters (like my blog, Reuters actually allows users to leave comments too) like, "apparently, the Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi is not aware of the process of naturalization". Okay, let me offer my perspective on this as a Eurasian person (well mostly Chinese but 15.8% European and that's official - do click on this link about my DNA test) with a British passport, this is potentially a contentious issue. So, did Home Minister Hamidi raise a valid point or is he being unfair?

Firstly, let's talk about Asian people who have Austrian or Italian nationality - there are small Asian minorities in both Italy and Austria. They are mostly concentrated in the larger cities like Rome, Milan and Vienna but yes they do exist. There are a few ways for an Asian immigrant to naturalize as an Austrian or Italian citizen but the two most common methods are marriage to a local or settling in the country after having worked a number of years. The EU is far more relaxed about naturalization compared to America, in the UK for example, you earn the right to apply for permanent leave to remain (ie. known as 'permanent residency' in Singapore) after having worked here for 5 years and you can apply for naturalization after 7 years. There are also Asian people who have been born in Italy and Austria and have grown up in these countries - Asian people have been present in Europe for many decades already, so in the UK for example, you have many 'BBCs' - British-born Chinese people who were born and brought up here.

I have no problems going through immigration control all over the world with my British passport, then again, I have a Chinese name which matches my Asian looking face. The border officials sometimes even chat with me, particularly in Singapore and Malaysia. Malaysian custom officials are especially friendly with me since I can speak some Malay and I would explain to them,  "Bapak saya yang dari Malaysia, ibu saya yang dari Singapura, tetapi sekarang saya yang British citizen, saya tinggal di England sejak 1997..." It's a plausible story, there's nothing suspect about it. I imagine more questions would be raised if I had a very English sounding surname like Anderson, Smith or Burlington.

I have traveled to many countries on my British passport - no problems!

So in the case of MH370, you had two Asian looking men getting through immigration control at KLIA with very European sounding names on their passports (Luigi Maraldi and Christian Kozel) - should the immigration officers have been asking more questions? I suppose I would have - this is a story I have heard through the grapevine, so it's not substantiated but it is an example of what an immigration official in Malaysia has done. There have been instances of PRCs (China nationals) using stolen Malaysian passports to gain entry into Malaysia - so what some immigration officials have done at KLIA (amongst other Malaysian airports) is to deliberately speak to the Chinese-Malaysian passengers only in Malay to obtain 'prove' that this person is indeed Malaysian because if you are Malaysian, you should be able to at least speak some Malay, right? They would single you out for further screening if you were a Chinese-Malaysian who couldn't even have a simple conversation in Malay.

Thus my Chinese-Malaysian friend (who grew up in Singapore and the UK but still holds on to his Malaysian passport) got into trouble once because he just can't speak enough Malay to convince them that he was genuinely Malaysian and thus he was singled out for further questioning. They quizzed about about whom his parents are, where their hometowns were and they let him through only after he managed to provide information about his parents which they managed to independently verify to be true. So yes Malaysian border control can be quite strict when it comes to people entering Malaysia. I would've subjected to such cases to a language test in a similar manner - but that would involve there being a German and Italian speaker available at immigration control at KLIA and we don't know  if this was available at the time but perhaps this is something they should be looking into in the long run.

Are interpreters available at KLIA to deal with potential illegal immigrants?

Besides, these Asian men had European surnames - what is going on there? Sure there are cases where Asian women have taken on the European surnames of their white husbands, but the reverse just doesn't happen. I suppose anyone could change their names to anything by deed poll - Freddie Mercury did just that, the name he was given at birth was Farrokh Bulsara. I suppose they could claim, "I was adopted by Italian parents, thus I took their surname Maraldi." But then you could then turn around and say, "Ah okay, so you were brought up by Italian parents then, go on then, can you speak Italian with us if we get an Italian interpreter in here right now? Surely you must speak Italian, right?" It wouldn't be hard at all to expose a fraud like that - I am sure even I could handle a case like that.

Nonetheless, I suspect that it boils down to the fact that these two men were leaving Malaysia, rather than trying to enter Malaysia, so the immigration officers would be more interested to check if the names on their passports matched their airline ticket and if they had the relevant visas for the countries they were traveling to. These two (presumably illegal immigrants en route to Europe) were flying to Beijing on MH370 and had onward flights booked with another airline from Beijing to Amsterdam with a different airline. These men would have remained in the transit area in Beijing airport rather than try to pass through Chinese immigration control (which can be quite strict) and would only have been subjected to immigration control when they would have arrived in Amsterdam. If the Dutch immigration controls refused them entry into Holland, then it would be the responsibility of the airline (now identified as KLM) to take them back to where they had come from (in this case, Beijing, where they boarded the flight). They would then be left in the transit area of Beijing airport where presumably, they would then become the responsibility of the country where they are genuinely from.

Did the immigration officials at KLIA turn a blind eye to stolen passports?

Of course, there is always the threat of terrorism - which is why immigration officers need to identify those who may be traveling on stolen passports and if there is anyone suspicious, they must be investigated. These Asian men traveling with the stolen passports must have changed the photo on the passport - they certainly wouldn't have gotten through immigration control if the photos in the passports were those of European men. That would've meant that the passports were definitely tampered with - surely this could have been spotted by the immigration officers if they had inspected the passport more carefully?  You can't just stick a new photo over the old one - this would have involved a pretty tricky task of removing the the original photo and relaminating the page. Furthermore, these passports were already listed as stolen with Interpol, so given how high tech KLIA is - why didn't their security systems flag up this fact?

It does seem that many opportunities to stop these two from boarding this flight were sadly missed and it all likelihood, these were probably two illegal immigrants who were trying to sneak into Europe with these stolen passports. Ironically, had the immigration officers stopped them from boarding this flight, that would have saved their lives. My guess is that the immigration officers at KLIA are under huge work pressure and when the queues get long, they spend no more than a few seconds with each passenger going through customs. One hopes that valuable lessons are learned and that all customs officials will be a lot more careful in the future to make flying safer for everyone.

As always, do let me know your thoughts on the issue, please leave a comment below. Was there more that KLIA immigration control could have done in this case? Thank you very much for reading, terima kasih.

UPDATE: There seems to be more information emerging now, there are conflicting reports about the men who used these stolen passports not 'looking Asian' after all according to Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, the head of Malaysia's Civil Aviation Authority on the latest report to appear on Reuters. There is also a new story in that same report about the Thai travel agent in Pattaya who booked those tickets for the men and this mysterious Iranian businessman known as 'Mr Ali' who paid for those tickets in cash - surely the Thai authorities have to investigate this now.