A Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew — including two Canadians — is presumed to have crashed after going missing off the Vietnamese coast on Saturday.
There were no reports of bad weather and no sign why the Boeing 777-200ER would have vanished from radar screens about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing. There were no signs of sabotage nor claims of a terrorist attack.
However, in Europe, news reports and officials said at least two people on board may have been carrying stolen passports.
The Italian foreign ministry said in Rome that an Italian was listed on the flight's manifest although no national from the country was on board.
In Vienna, the Austrian foreign ministry said an Austrian listed among the passengers was safe and had reported his passport stolen two years ago while he was travelling in Thailand.
Asked for a possible explanation for the plane's disappearance, Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told a news conference: "We are not ruling out any possibilities."
The two Canadian passengers aboard a Malaysia Airlines plane were identified as mining executive Muktesh Mukherjee and his wife Xiaomo Bai.
The two Canadians were named in the flight manifest, released by the airline Saturday. The airline told CBC News that family members of the two Canadians had been informed.
By late on Saturday night, there were no confirmed signs of the plane or any wreckage, over 20 hours after it went missing. Operations will continue through the night, officials said.
Vietnam said its rescue planes had spotted two large oil slicks and a column of smoke off its coastline, but it was not clear if they were connected to the missing plane.
"We sent two maritime boats and some military boats there to clarify, each boat with about 20 people," Pham Quy Tieu, vice minister of transportation, told Reuters by telephone on Saturday evening. "The oil spills are about 15 kilometres long. Those boats will be there in about three to four hours."
PASSENGERS RELATIVE'S ACTION
The disappearance of the plane is a chilling echo of an Air France flight that crashed into the South Atlantic on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people on board. It vanished for hours and wreckage was found only two days later.Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 last had contact with air traffic controllers 120 nautical miles off the east coast of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu, Malaysia Airlines chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said in a statement.
Earlier on Saturday, the airline had said people from 14 nationalities were among the 227 passengers, including at least 152 Chinese, 38 Malaysians, seven Indonesians, six Australians, five Indians, four French and three Americans.
Flight tracking website flightaware.com showed the plane flew northeast over Malaysia after takeoff and climbed to an altitude of 35,000 feet. The flight vanished from the website's tracking records a minute later while it was still climbing.
Chinese relatives of passengers angrily accused the airline of keeping them in the dark, while state media criticized the carrier's poor response.
"There's no one from the company here, we can't find a single person. They've just shut us in this room and told us to wait," said one middle-aged man at a hotel near Beijing airport where the relatives were taken.
"We want someone to show their face. They haven't even given us the passenger list," he said.
Another relative, trying to evade a throng of reporters, muttered: "They're treating us worse than dogs."
In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Airlines told passengers' next of kin to come to the international airport with their passports to prepare to fly to the crash site, which has still not been identified.
About 20 to 30 families were being kept in a holding room at the airport, where they were being guarded by security officials and kept away from reporters.
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