40 ships, 34 aircraft search for missing plane

Vietnamese navy planes have spotted
what could be fragments from the
missing Malaysia Airlines jet that
disappeared almost two days ago.
Officials said it was too dark to be
certain the objects were from Flight
MH370, which had 239 people on board,
BBC reports.
A multinational team is searching for
wreckage and ships will try to confirm
the find after dawn. Investigators are
also checking CCTV footage of two
passengers who were travelling on
stolen passports.
Malaysian military officials said on
Sunday that the plane may have turned
back from its scheduled route shortly
before vanishing from radar screens,
further deepening the mystery
surrounding its fate.
Relatives of the missing passengers have
been told to prepare for the worst.
Flight MH730 left Kuala Lumpur, bound
for Beijing, at 00:41 local time on
Saturday (16:41 GMT on Friday). But
radio contact was lost at 17:30 GMT,
somewhere between Malaysia and
Vietnam.
Late on Sunday, the Vietnamese
authorities said possible debris from the
plane had been spotted in the sea off
South Vietnam.
"We received information from a
Vietnamese plane saying that they found
two broken objects, which seem like
those of an aircraft, located about 50
miles to the south-west of Tho Chu
Island," an unnamed official from the
National Committee for Search and
Rescue told AFP news agency.
"As it is night they cannot fish them out
for proper identification. They have
located the position of the areas and
flown back to the land," he added
The potential debris was in a similar
area to a possible oil slick seen by
Vietnamese navy planes on Saturday,
but officials have cautioned that this too
may be nothing to do with the
disappearance of Flight MH370.
There are now 40 ships and 34 aircraft
from nine different nations taking part
in the search for the missing plane in
the seas off Vietnam and Malaysia.
Other teams are investigating the
identities of some of the people
onboard.
Malaysia's civil aviation chief,
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said five
passengers booked on the flight did not
board and their luggage was
consequently removed.
It has also been confirmed that two
passengers were travelling on stolen
passports.
The passengers – travelling with Italian
and Austrian passports that had been
stolen in Thailand – purchased their
plane tickets at the same time, and
were both booked on the same onward
flight from Beijing to Europe on
Saturday.
Both had purchased their tickets from
China Southern Airlines, which shared
the flight with Malaysia Airlines, and
they had consecutive ticket numbers.
"Whilst it is too soon to speculate about
any connection between these stolen
passports and the missing plane, it is
clearly of great concern that any
passenger was able to board an
international flight using a stolen
passport listed in Interpol databases,"
the Secretary General of international
police agency Interpol, Ronald Noble,
said in a statement.