By: Won Gyung
Last July, there
was a big accident in San Francisco, the crash of Asiana flight. It was a
terrible accident, and people wished that it will happen no more. However, a
few days ago, the flight accident occurred again in Malaysia. Not as same as
San Francisco accident, this accident is that airplane disappeared without any
emergency signal. I hope that the accident will not be related with terrorism,
and everyone who are on the board will safe.
The stolen passport:
It is confusing enough an aircraft seems to have disappeared without a trace.
To plus to the mystery is the news that at least two people on the plane were
traveling on stolen passports. The FBI is running those passengers’ thumbprints
which were taken at the airport check in Malaysia and were shared with
intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world by the Malaysian
government. A majority of the 239 people on the plane were from Asia, according
to the airline's manifest. There were 154 people from China or Taiwan and 38
people from Malaysia aboard. Two people who are assumed to steal passports “are
not Asian-looking men”, Rahman said Monday.
So far, nothing:
The plane disappeared somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam. After then, many
countries such as Vietnam, China, Singapore, Indonesia, the United States,
Thailand, Australia, the Philippines and New Zealand sent teams of searchers,
and have been finding the airplane around alongside Malaysians to the Gulf of
Thailand, part of the South China Sea that lies between several Southeast Asian
countries. The focus has shifted to the Andaman Sea, near Thailand's border,
after radar data indicated the plane have turned around to head back to Malaysia.
Yet the pilot apparently gave no signal to authorities that he was turning
around.
Terrorism concern: The
passport mystery concerned about the possibility of terrorism, yet officials
cautioned that it was still too early to arrive at any conclusions. One
possibility for using of the stolen passports is illegal immigration. There are
cases of illegal immigrants using fake passports to try to enter Western countries
before this accident, and Southeast Asia is known to be a market for stolen
passports. The incident has some resemblances to such previous incidents like
the 1994 bombing of a Philippine jetliner that investigators learned was a test
run for a wider plot to explosive numerous airliners.
Agonizing wait: For
the families of the 227 passengers and 12 crew members, the wait has been
disturbing. In Beijing, the relatives gathered in a conference room at a hotel
complex. More than 100 people signed a hand-written petition that demanded “truth”
from the airline. Also, they persuaded strongly the Chinese government to help
them deal with Malaysian authorities. A fuller picture of what happened may not
become available until finders search the plane and its flight data recorder.
But still, that hasn’t happened.
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