WASHINGTON — As an armada of ships, planes and helicopters combed the waters south of Vietnam on Monday for any sign of a missing Malaysian airliner, aviation safety experts said the discovery that two passengers aboard the plane were traveling on stolen passports has revealed a major gap in airline security procedures developed since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Interpol created a database of stolen and lost passports in 2002 that has grown to more than 40 million documents available for governments to screen for terrorists, smugglers or swindlers who travel the world illicitly. But according to the international law enforcement agency, only three countries — the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates — systematically screen travelers against the agency’s database of stolen passports.
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The two men with stolen passports who boarded the missing Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing over the weekend did not have their passports screened. And last year, Interpol said, passengers around the world were able to board planes more than a billion times without having their passports checked against the database.
“If Malaysia Airlines and all airlines worldwide were able to check the passport details of prospective passengers against Interpol’s database, then we would not have to speculate whether stolen passports were used by terrorists to board MH 370,” Ronald K. Noble, Interpol’s secretary general, said in a statement on Sunday, referring to the Malaysia Airlines flight. “We would know that stolen passports were not used by any of the passengers to board that flight.”
Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said Monday that the stolen passports might not have had anything to do with what happened to the jet. Still, they said, the episode had cast a spotlight on a flaw in security defenses built over the past decade to counter illicit travel and illegal trafficking of people, drugs and other contraband.
Renewed focus on the critical database, which has apparently gone underutilized, came on a day when the search for the missing jetliner and its 239 passengers and crew members was set back by a number of false leads that seemed to underline how little investigators knew about the location of the plane, which vanished on Saturday. Malaysian officials said late on Monday that they were expanding the search to a much wider area, including waters north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, hundreds of miles from the aircraft’s last reported position.
One of the many vexing mysteries of the plane’s disappearance was the hunt for the true identity of the two passengers who used passports stolen from European tourists in Thailand in the past two years. A senior American law enforcement official said Sunday that Thai officials were investigating a so-called passport ring operating on the resort island of Phuket, where both passports were stolen and where, he noted, false documents were routinely used by drug smugglers.
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Governments around the world have spent vast sums in the past decade to apply watermarks in passport books and encrypt authenticating information in the documents, all in efforts to combat increasingly sophisticated passport theft rings and forgers, the authorities said Monday. But the great majority of Interpol’s member nations still have not integrated the agency’s database of stolen passports beyond a central national office in each country — an office that can check a passport upon specific request or in an emergency, as member nations did after Malaysia Airlines published the passenger manifest of Flight MH370.
Some authorities said on Monday that a perception persists among some aviation officials that integrating Interpol’s database of stolen passports would be a costly, cumbersome process, a characterization that Interpol officials disputed. “It’s a nominal cost,” said one Interpol official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of agency protocol. “We’re not talking millions here.”
The official said Interpol was also willing to offer technical assistance to any member country that requested it.
“Whether or not this eventually involves terrorism, this incident has certainly brought to light an area of potential vulnerability on a global scale,” said Mark Dombroff, a former Justice Department official who is now a partner specializing in aviation issues in the Washington office of the law firm McKenna Long & Aldridge.
