KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- Vietnam scrambled helicopters Monday to
look for what a search jet spotted and believed might have been a life
raft from the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that vanished
early Saturday morning on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with
239 people on board, but the object found floating in the sea was not a
boat, leaving the fate of the airliner a mystery.
Vietnam's
Civil Aviation Authority said on its website that a helicopter had
located and retrieved the object, "identified as a moss-covered cap of a
cablereel," according to the Reuters news agency. The statement didn't
confirm whether the item could still have been from a plane, but it
seemed to quash hopes sparked by reports that a possible life raft was
spotted.The civil aviation group in Vietnam said the object was seen by a plane
out of Singapore, which relayed the information to Vietnamese
authorities.
Earlier Monday, the man heading up Malaysia's investigation said searchers hadn't spotted any debris from the plane.
"Unfortunately,
ladies and gentlemen, we have not found anything that appears to be
objects from the aircraft, let alone the aircraft. As far as we are
concerned, we have to find the aircraft," said Department of Civil
Aviation Director General Azharuddin Abdul Rahman.
The Aviation
Authority also confirmed Monday than an oil slick seen on the water over
the weekend -- often a tell-tale sign of a plane crash -- was not
believed to be linked to Flight 370, leaving investigators with no clues
at all.
Ships from about a dozen nations were taking part in
the search, he said. On Monday, the U.S. military announced that USS
Kidd had joined USS Pinckney in the search efforts.
The National
Transportation Safety Board investigative team assigned to the
investigation is on the ground in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. The
team is waiting for a scene to investigate.Among items of particular interest was a rectangular object spotted
Sunday afternoon that might have been one of the plane's doors.
Rahman
also said terrorism has not been ruled out as the reason Flight MH370
disappeared about an hour into its flight after reaching a cruising
altitude of 35,000 feet. "We are looking at every angle," he said. "We
remain puzzled" about what happened to the jetliner.
At
this point in the investigation, multiple U.S. intelligence agencies
tell CBS News they are not seeing any credible claims of terrorist
involvement in the disappearance of Malaysia Air 370. In addition, U.S.
officials say the use of stolen passports in this part of the world is
not uncommon. The use of fake or stolen passports does not immediately
tie this crash to a terrorist attack.
However, the investigation has hardly begun since the plane has not been found and the black boxes not recovered.
The
plane lost contact with ground controllers somewhere between Malaysia
and Vietnam, and searchers in a low-flying plane spotted an object that
appeared to be one of the plane's doors, the state-run Thanh Nien
newspaper said, citing the deputy chief of staff of Vietnam's army, Lt.
Gen. Vo Van Tuan.
The jetliner apparently
fell from the sky in fine weather, and the pilots were either unable or
had no time to send a distress signal, adding to the mystery over the final minutes of the flight. There are also questions over how two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft using stolen passports. Interpol confirmed it knew about the stolen passports but said no authorities checked its vast databases on stolen documents before the Boeing jetliner departed Saturday.
Experts
tell CBS News the failure to screen hundreds of millions of
international passengers for fraudulent or lost documents is a major aviation security loophole.
Warning
"only a handful of countries" routinely make such checks, Interpol
secretary general Ronald Noble chided authorities for "waiting for a
tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and
boarding gates."
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.
"I can confirm that we have the visuals of these two people on CCTV,"
Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news
conference late Sunday, adding that the footage was being examined. "We
have intelligence agencies, both local and international," helping in
the investigation.
The thefts of the two passports - one
belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel and the other to Luigi Maraldi, of
Italy, were entered into Interpol's database after they were stolen in
Thailand in 2012 and last year, the police body said.
Electronic
booking records show that one-way tickets with those names were issued
Thursday from a travel agency in the beach resort of Pattaya, in eastern
Thailand. A person who answered the phone at the agency said she could
not comment.
But no authorities in Malaysia or elsewhere
checked the passports against the database of 40 million stolen or lost
travel documents before the Malaysian Airlines plane took off.
Possible
causes of the crash included some sort of explosion, a catastrophic
failure of the plane's engines, extreme turbulence, pilot error or even
suicide. Establishing what happened with any certainty will need data
from flight recorders and a detailed examination of any debris,
something that will take months if not years.
Malaysia's air force chief, Rodzali Daud, said radar indicated that before it disappeared, the plane may have turned back, but there were no further details on which direction it went or how far it veered off course. "We
are trying to make sense of this," Daud said at a news conference. "The
military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back,
and in some parts this was corroborated by civilian radar."
Malaysia
Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said pilots are supposed
to inform the airline and traffic control authorities if the plane does a
U-turn. "From what we have, there was no such distress signal or
distress call per se, so we are equally puzzled," he said.A total of 34 aircraft and 40 ships from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand,
Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and the United States were
deployed to the area where ground controllers lost contact with the
plane on the maritime border between Malaysia and Vietnam.
Of
the 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board, two-thirds were
Chinese, while the rest were from elsewhere in Asia, Europe and North
America, including three Americans.
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