![]() There is no evidence the plane’s disappearance is linked to the two passengers travelling under the stolen passports. Thai and foreign investigators were questioning staff at one travel agent on Monday. The passports were used to buy tickets from travel agents in the resort town of Pattaya, to Beijing and on to Europe. Both had passports stolen on the Thai holiday island of Phuket. The passenger manifest issued by Malaysia Airlines included the names of two Europeans - Austrian Christian Kozel and Italian Luigi Maraldi - who were not on the plane. The passports may be altered, for example with a new photograph, but sometimes the fraudulent user hopes to pass as the real owner. They are passed on to middlemen, Thai or foreign, who work with criminal networks, he said. Sometimes documents are sold by their owners to cover travel costs, Apichart said. “Fake passports and identity fraud in general is a massive problem in Thailand,” police commander and Thailand’s Interpol director Apichart Suriboonya told Reuters. ![]() Others are suspected to have ended up in the hands of Islamist militants. Some are known to be sold on through syndicates to drug traffickers. Thai authorities struggle to track thousands of lost or stolen passports each year. BANGKOK (Reuters) - With huge numbers of visitors and patchy law enforcement, Thailand has a booming black market for fake identity documents, and it was here that two passengers on a missing Malaysia Airlines jet were apparently able to get hold of stolen passports.
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