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 from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing with 239 people on board.
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."
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. 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.
In a forceful statement, the Interpol chief, who has called passport fraud one of the world's greatest threats, said he hoped "that governments and airlines worldwide will learn from the tragedy."
"Now, we have a real case where the world is speculating whether the stolen passport holders were terrorists," Noble said.
"Interpol is asking why only a handful of countries worldwide are taking care to make sure that persons possessing stolen passports are not boarding international flights."
So here we have a resource which would seem to be fundamental to air travel security and most countries/airlines don't even bother their ass using it......