World

KUALA LUMPUR — Malaysia’s military believes a jetliner missing for almost four days turned and flew hundreds of kilometres to the west after it last made contact with civilian air traffic control off the country’s east coast, a senior officer told Reuters on Tuesday.

In one of the most baffling mysteries in recent aviation history, a massive search operation for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER has so far found no trace of the aircraft or the 239 passengers and crew.

Malaysian authorities have previously said flight MH370 disappeared about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur for the Chinese capital Beijing.

“It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Malacca Strait,” the senior military officer, who has been briefed on investigations, told Reuters.

That would appear to rule out sudden catastrophic mechanical failure, as it would mean the plane flew around 500km at least after its last contact with air traffic control, although its transponder and other tracking systems were off.

A non-military source familiar with the investigations said the report was one of several theories and was being checked.

Lost contact

At the time it lost contact with civilian air traffic control, the plane was roughly midway between Malaysia’s east coast town of Kota Bharu and the southern tip of Vietnam, flying at 10,670 metres.

The Strait of Malacca, one of the world’s busiest shipping channels, runs along Malaysia’s west coast.

Malaysia’s Berita Harian newspaper quoted air force chief Rodzali Daud as saying the plane was last detected at 2:40am by military radar near the island of Pulau Perak at the northern end of the Strait of Malacca. It was flying about 1,000 metres lower than its previous altitude, he was quoted as saying.

There was no word on what happened to the plane thereafter.

The effect of turning off the transponder is to make the aircraft inert to secondary radar, so civil controllers cannot identify it. Secondary radar interrogates the transponder and gets information about the plane’s identity, speed and height.

It would however still be visible to primary radar, which is used by militaries.

Police had earlier said they were investigating whether any passengers or crew on the plane had personal or psychological problems that might explain its disappearance, along with the possibility of a hijack, sabotage or mechanical failure.

There was no distress signal or radio contact indicating a problem and, in the absence of any wreckage or flight data, police have been left trawling through passenger and crew lists for potential leads.

“Maybe somebody on the flight has bought a huge sum of insurance, who wants family to gain from it or somebody who has owed somebody so much money, you know, we are looking at all possibilities,” Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar told a news conference.

“We are looking very closely at the video footage taken at the KLIA [Kuala Lumpur International Airport], we are studying the behavioural pattern of all the passengers.”

The airline said it was taking seriously a report by a South African woman who said the co-pilot of the missing plane had invited her and a female travelling companion to sit in the cockpit during a flight two years ago, in an apparent breach of security.

“Malaysia Airlines has become aware of the allegations being made against First Officer Fariq Ab Hamid which we take very seriously. We are shocked by these allegations. We have not been able to confirm the validity of the pictures and videos of the alleged incident,” the airline said.

The woman, Jonti Roos, said in an interview with Australia’s Channel Nine TV that she and her friend were invited to fly in the cockpit by Hamid and the pilot between Phuket, Thailand and Kuala Lumpur in December 2011. The TV channel showed pictures of the four in the cockpit.

A huge search operation for the missing plane has been mostly focused on the shallow waters of the Gulf of Thailand off Malaysia’s east coast, although the Strait of Malacca has been included since Sunday.

Navy ships, military aircraft, helicopters, coastguard and civilian vessels from 10 nations have criss-crossed the seas off both coasts of Malaysia without success.

Stolen passports

The fact that at least two passengers on board had used stolen passports has raised suspicions of foul play. But Southeast Asia is known as a hub for false documents that are also used by smugglers, illegal migrants and asylum seekers.

Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble named the two men as Iranians aged 18 and 29, who had entered Malaysia using their real passports before using the stolen European documents to board the Beijing-bound flight.

“The more information we get, the more we are inclined to conclude it is not a terrorist incident,” Noble said.

In Washington, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency said intelligence officials could not rule out terrorism as a factor. “You cannot discount any theory,” CIA Director John Brennan said.

Khalid said the younger man, who he said was 19, appeared to be an illegal immigrant. His mother was waiting for him in Frankfurt and had been in contact with authorities, he said.

“We believe he is not likely to be a member of any terrorist group, and we believe he was trying to migrate to Germany,” Khalid said.

Asked if that meant he ruled out a hijack, Khalid said: “[We are giving] same weightage to all [possibilities] until we complete our investigations.”

Both men entered Malaysia on February 28, at least one from Phuket, in Thailand, eight days before boarding the flight to Beijing, Malaysian immigration chief Aloyah Mamat told the news conference. Both held onward reservations to Western Europe.

Police in Thailand, where the Italian and Austrian passports were stolen and the tickets used by the two men were booked, said they did not think they were linked to the disappearance of the plane.

“We haven’t ruled it out, but the weight of evidence we’re getting swings against the idea that these men are or were involved in terrorism,” Supachai Puikaewcome, chief of police in the Thai resort city of Pattaya, told Reuters.

About two-thirds of the 227 passengers and 12 crew now presumed to have died aboard the plane were Chinese. Other nationalities included 38 Malaysians, seven Indonesians, six Australians, five Indians, four French and three Americans.

China has deployed 10 satellites using high-resolution earth imaging capabilities, visible light imaging and other technologies to “support and assist in the search and rescue operations”, the People’s Liberation Army Daily said.

US government officials from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration have arrived in the region to provide “any necessary assistance” with the investigation, White House spokesman Jay Carney said in Washington.

The Boeing 777 has one of the best safety records of any commercial aircraft in service. Its only previous fatal crash came on July 6 last year when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 struck a seawall on landing in San Francisco, killing three people.

US planemaker Boeing has declined to comment beyond a brief statement saying it was monitoring the situation.

KIEV — Ukraine’s foreign minister said Monday that his country was practically in a state of war with Russia, as Moscow further ratcheted up pressure on Kiev, claiming that Russian-leaning eastern regions have plunged into lawlessness.

Russian forces have effectively taken control over Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in what has turned into Europe’s greatest geopolitical crisis since the end of the Cold War. On Sunday, the region is to hold a referendum on whether to split off and become part of Russia, which the West says it will not recognise.

“We have to admit that our life now is almost like ... a war,” Foreign Minister Andrii Deshchytsya said before meeting his counterparts from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. “We have to cope with an aggression that we do not understand.”

Deshchytsya said Ukraine is counting on help from the West. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is to meet with President Barack Obama in Washington on Wednesday.

On Monday, the Russian foreign ministry said lawlessness “now rules in eastern regions of Ukraine as a result of the actions of fighters of the so-called ‘Right Sector,’ with the full connivance” of Ukraine’s new authorities.

Right Sector is a grouping of several far-right and nationalist factions whose activists were among the most radical and confrontational of the three-month-long demonstrations in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, which eventually ousted president Viktor Yanukovych.

The Kremlin statement also claimed Russian citizens trying to enter Ukraine have been turned back at the border by Ukrainian officials.

Pro-Russia sentiment is high in Ukraine’s east and there are fears Russia could seek to incorporate that area as well.

Obama has warned that the referendum in Crimea would violate international law. But on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin made it clear that he supports the vote, in phone calls with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Minister David Cameron.

“The steps taken by the legitimate leadership of Crimea are based on the norms of international law and aim to ensure the legal interests of the population of the peninsula,” said Putin, according to the Kremlin.

On Monday, Putin was briefed by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, on the contents of a document Lavrov received from Secretary of State John Kerry explaining the US view of the situation in Ukraine.

That document contains “a concept which does not quite agree with us because everything was stated in terms of allegedly having a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and in terms of accepting the fait accompli,” Lavrov said. The Kremlin contends Yanukovych, Ukraine’s legally elected, pro-Kremlin president, was ousted by a coup.

Lavrov said Kerry had been invited to come to Russia to discuss the situation. “We suggested that he come today, I think, and we were prepared to receive him. He gave his preliminary consent. He then called me on Saturday and said he would like to postpone it for a while,” the minister said.

In Washington, the State Department said it was still waiting to hear from Moscow whether it would accept a US proposal for negotiating an end to the crisis in Ukraine.

A statement released Monday said Kerry, in weekend discussion with Lavrov, reiterated Washington’s demand that Moscow pull back its troops from Ukraine and end attempts to annex the Crimean peninsula. Kerry also called on Russia to cease what the statement described as “provocative steps” to allow diplomatic talks to continue.

In Kiev, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the businessman and Putin critic who was once Russia’s most famous prisoner, said Monday his country is ruining its longstanding friendship with Ukraine.

“The question of Crimea’s fate is very painful both for Ukrainians and for Russians. It’s not just a simple territorial dispute for some extra square kilometres,” Khodorkovsky told a packed hall at Kiev Polytechnic University.

“For Russians, it’s a sacred place, an important element in our historical memory and the most painful wound since the Soviet collapse,” Khodorkovsky said. Nevertheless, he said, the symbolism of Crimea for Russians cannot justify “such a blatant incursion into the affairs of a historically friendly state”.

He called for Crimea to remain part of Ukraine, but with broader regional powers and the protection of the rights of Russian speakers there.

Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s wealthiest man, was pardoned last December by Putin. Many believe he was convicted of tax violations and other crimes and sent to prison on trumped-up charges.

On Sunday, Khodorkovsky almost wept as he urged a large crowd in Kiev’s center not to believe that all Russians support their government’s actions in Crimea.

FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI, Japan — In complete darkness, a group of men tried everything they could to save the Fukushima nuclear plant from catastrophe. Their struggle was in vain.

Three years later, the control room at the site of the worst atomic crisis in a generation — which forced a hard look at Japan’s energy policy — sits as a grim time capsule.

Helmets, masks, several pairs of gloves and overalls remain as reporters are taken on a tour of the inner sanctum, a first since the accident.

Notes are scribbled awkwardly on walls in rooms with levers, dials, and buttons, reminders of March 11, 2011, when a towering wall of water plunged the site into darkness and sent reactors into meltdown.

What was happening inside the reactor core was unknown to the workers who fought hour after hour before they were forced to abandon part of the doomed site.

Not far away in the destroyed reactors, radioactivity is so strong that it remains a no-go area.

“The guys that were working here are not at the plant anymore — they got too much radiation,” said Kenichiro Matsui, an official at Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO).

Workers now at the site have yet to even start dismantling the crippled reactors, a process not expected to begin for another six years, part of a decommissioning process expected to stretch over decades.

Several thousand employees are locked in a daily — and dangerous — scramble under harsh conditions to keep the site as safe as possible, making a myriad of repairs and building tanks for the vast amounts of contaminated water.

The company poured thousands of tonnes of water onto runaway reactors to keep them cool, and continues to douse them, but has to store and clean that water in a growing number of temporary tanks at the site.

TEPCO has warned it is running out of storage space and many experts believe the water will eventually have to be dumped into the sea after being scoured of its most harmful contaminants.

Local fishermen, neighbouring countries and environmental groups all oppose the idea.

Last year, the embattled firm said around 300 tonnes of radioactive liquid were believed to have escaped, a serious incident that underscored the litany of ongoing problems at Fukushima.

 ‘Four steps forward, two steps back’ 

“The management of this water problem is still not satisfactory,” said Dale Klein, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Authority and a member of the committee overseeing the plant’s decommissioning.

He added that the “four steps forward, two steps back” progress has hurt confidence in the utility’s crisis management, already under fire since the accident that forced tens of thousands to flee their homes, possibly forever.

The crisis forced the shutdown of Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors, which remain offline as anti-atomic sentiment ripples through communities big and small in the country of 128 million.

Tens of thousands of citizens turned out for an anti-nuclear rally in Tokyo on Sunday to voice their anger at the nuclear industry and the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has called for resumption of reactors to power the world’s third-largest economy.

Abe repeated his view Monday that any reactors which can be deemed safe would be turned back on, burying a move by the previous government to make Japan a zero-nuclear country by 2040.

But critics say that TEPCO’s clumsy management of the crisis and wider concerns about the accident — including long-term health fears — should keep nuclear offline for good.

“Prime Minister Abe and the nuclear industry are hoping the Japanese people and the world will forget the victims and the terrible lessons of Fukushima, hoping that they will allow the restart of old, risky reactors,” said Junichi Sato, executive director of Greenpeace Japan.

“What we should instead forget is an energy system that is dependent on old, dirty, and dangerous technologies like nuclear and fossil fuels.”

The government has backed a push into solar power and wind farms, among other renewable energy sources, but they still make up a tiny portion of Japan’s energy needs.

The loss of nuclear power, which once supplied more than a quarter of Japan’s power, has also created huge trade imbalances owing to surging imports of fossil-fuel alternatives to plug the energy gap, made all the more expensive as the yen weakened sharply since Abe swept to office in 2012.

Another issue is that the move to fossil fuels has stoked worries that Japan would not meet its commitment to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, while making it more dependent on other nations for its energy security.

KIEV — Pro-Russian activists attacked supporters of Kiev’s new leaders with clubs and whips as thousands rallied across Ukraine in rival demonstrations Sunday, while Russian President Vladimir Putin dug in his heels in the escalating standoff with the West.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered a strong rebuke to the Russian strongman, telling him a planned Crimea referendum on joining the Russian Federation was “illegal” and bemoaning the lack of progress on creating an international diplomatic group to try to resolve the crisis.

In phone conversations with Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron, Putin in turn accused Ukraine’s new leaders of failing to rein in “ultra-nationalist and radical forces”.

He also defied Western condemnation of the March 16 referendum, saying the pro-Russian authorities in Crimea organising the vote were legitimate and acting “based on international law”.

But in a clear sign of support for Ukraine’s new leaders in the gravest post-Cold War crisis between Russia and the West, US President Barack Obama is to meet interim prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk on Wednesday.

Separatist tensions were running high Sunday on the strategic Black Sea Peninsula which is now under Moscow’s de facto control.

In Sevastopol, pro-Moscow militants wearing balaclavas and bullet proof vests, joined by Cossacks wielding whips, attacked a small rally for Ukrainian unity.

Thousands of supporters of integration with Russia also seized regional government headquarters in the eastern city of Lugansk and hoisted a Russian flag outside a security service building in Donetsk.

In Kiev, Putin’s top foe Mikahil Khodorkovsky, a former Russian oligarch who spent a decade in Russian prisons, addressed a crowd of thousands on Independence Square — the epicentre of the protests.

An emotional Khodorkovsky said Russia had colluded with the former Ukrainian authorities in violence that claimed 100 lives over three months of demonstrations against ousted president Viktor Yanukovych.

“They told me what the authorities did here. They did this with the agreement of the Russian leadership,” Russia’s former richest man said from a stage.

“I wanted to cry. It is terrifying. This is not my leadership. I want you to know — there is a different Russia,” he said, holding back tears, adding that Russia and Ukraine “have a common European future”.

Yatsenyuk, who heads to Washington this week, vowed Ukraine would not cede “an inch” of its territory to Moscow.

“It is our land,” he told a crowd of several thousand in Kiev.

A senior Russian lawmaker, meanwhile, said Moscow had set aside $1.1 billion (790 million euros) in aid for Crimea.

The tensions in Ukraine have stretched diplomatic relations between Moscow and Washington nearly to breaking point and regular talks have brought little except mutual accusations and grave warnings.

US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Saturday following his latest talks with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov that continued Russian military defiance “would close any available space for diplomacy”.

 Important to be united 

Illustrating the divisions in Ukraine, interim president Oleksandr Turchynov led a minute of silence at the Kiev rally for slain demonstrators.

In contrast, pro-Moscow activists in Donetsk paid tribute to a feared riot police unit accused of shooting at protesters in the explosion of violence in Kiev last month.

“Russia! Russia!” the activists, waving Russian flags, shouted in Donetsk, the heartland of the former president who fled to Russia after his overthrow.

Former boxer turned politician Vitali Klitschko was also in the industrial city and called for unity.

“It’s very important today to be united. It’s not important where people live — east or west of Ukraine, south or north,” Klitschko said, although he later cancelled a rally for fear of violence.

In Kharkiv in the northeast  — a city almost evenly split between Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers — hundreds of Orthodox believers gathered to pray for peace, kneeling in a city centre square.

In Odessa, local media said some 3,000 people sang Ukraine’s national anthem on the Potemkin Stairs made famous by the silent film “The Battleship Potemkin”.

‘Illegal occupation’ 

Rival protesters in the Crimean capital Simferopol vented their anger at each other but their rallies were peaceful on Sunday, as Ukrainians celebrated the 200th anniversary of 19th-century poet and national unity figure Taras Shevchenko.

“They cannot seize Crimea, [it’s an] illegal occupation,” said Svyatoslav Regushevsky, a 46-year-old who attended the unity rally with his two-year-old son, wearing a ski jacket in the colours of the Ukrainian flag.

Around 1,000 people joined the demonstration, while some 10,000 turned out for a rival rally across town on Lenin Square in a sea of Russian tricolours.

A number of security incidents in Crimea point to the situation worsening, with Ukrainian border guards reporting the arrival by land and sea of 60 Russian military lorries on the rugged peninsula of two million people.

The border service said Sunday that “Russian extremists” had attacked a radar post, in the latest move by Russian forces surrounding Ukrainian military bases in the region.

Ukrainian authorities have also accused Russia of deliberately sinking three of its own ships into a lake off the Black Sea to block the Ukrainian navy.

There were also Ukrainian troop movements from the west with 50 armoured personnel carriers seen rolling out of the city of Lviv on Saturday in what the defence ministry said were pre-planned exercises.

 Sanctions and threats 

As the crisis has escalated, Washington has imposed visa bans on targeted Russians and Ukrainians and warned of wider sanctions against Russia, while the EU has halted visa and other talks with Moscow.

Russia has warned that any sanctions would “inevitably have a boomerang effect” and a defence official said Saturday Moscow may halt foreign inspections of its nuclear arsenal in response to “threats” from the US and NATO.

Adding to the tensions, state-run energy giant Gazprom has warned debt-stricken Ukraine it may cut off gas supplies over an unpaid $1.89-billion bill — a move that could have knock-on effects across Europe.

Moscow continues to insist it has sent no extra troops to Crimea, despite parliament giving Putin the greenlight to do so, and says it is only deploying units from its Black Sea Fleet already stationed there.

Erik Nielsen, chief economist at UniCredit bank, predicted that with Crimea under Russia’s “de facto control”, Moscow will no longer be a member of the G-8 by the end of the year and will have suffered political isolation and economic fallout.

SEOUL — Almost all North Koreans cast their ballots Sunday in a pre-determined election for a rubber-stamp parliament — an exercise that doubles as a national head count and may offer clues to power shifts in Pyongyang.

All registered voters — except those who are currently abroad — took part in the nationwide elections for members of the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), the state-run KCNA news agency said.

Those who are ill or infirm and cannot travel to polling stations are casting votes at special “mobile ballot boxes”, it said.

“Overjoyed” voters rushed to polling stations across the country from early in the morning, it claimed, adding many danced and played music on the street in praise of the leader, Kim Jong-un.

The North’s state TV showed hundreds of people across the country clad in brightly-coloured traditional dresses dancing in circles on the street. Kim also cast his vote along with high-ranking army and party cadres.

Apart from the physical casting of votes, there is nothing democratic about the ballot. The results are a foregone conclusion, with only one approved candidate standing for each of the 687 districts.

The isolated communist state has for decades boasted voter turnouts of nearly 100 per cent for its “elections” in which an uncontested candidate wins unanimously at all times.

It was the first election to the SPA under the leadership of Kim, who took over the reins of power on the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in December 2011.

And like his father before him, Kim stood as a candidate — in constituency number 111, Mount Paektu.

Koreans have traditionally attributed divine status to Mount Paektu and, according to the North’s official propaganda, Kim Jong-Il was born on its slopes.

TV footage showed hundreds of soldiers queuing up at a polling station in constituency number 111 and dancing in unison on the street to festive music.

Portraits of Jong-il and Kim Il-sung — Jong-un’s late grandfather and the nation’s founding president — were hung on the wall behind the ballot box. Soldiers deeply bowed to the portraits after casting their votes.

“I gave the vote, the evidence of my loyalty, to our supreme leader comrade,” one soldier said in a TV interview.

Elections are normally held every five years to the SPA, which only meets once or twice a year, mostly for a day-long session, to rubber-stamp budgets or other decisions made by the ruling Workers’ Party.

The last session in April 2013 adopted a special ordinance formalising the country’s position as a nuclear weapons state — a status that both South Korea and the United States have vowed not to recognise.

The real interest for outside observers is the final list of candidates or winners — both lists being identical.

Many top Korean officials are members of the parliament, and the election is an opportunity to see if any established names are absent.

It comes at a time of heightened speculation over the stability of Kim’s regime.

Kim has already overseen sweeping changes within the North’s ruling elite — the most dramatic example being the execution of his powerful uncle and political mentor Jang Song-thaek in December on charges of treason and corruption.

“It’s a chance to see who might be tagged for key roles under Kim Jong-un,” said professor Yang Moo-jin of the University for North Korean Studies.

Policy clues

“The list of names can also point to what, if any, generational changes have been made and what policy directions Kim Jong-un might be favouring,” Yang said.

In the absence of any competing candidates, voters are simply required to mark “yes” next to the name on the ballot sheet.

“Let us all cast ‘yes’ votes,” said one of many election banners that state TV showed being put up in the capital Pyongyang.

And they do.

The official turnout at the last election in 2009 was put at 99.98 per cent of registered voters, with 100 per cent voting for the approved candidate in each seat.

For the North Korean authorities, the vote effectively doubles as a census, as election officials visit every home in the country to ensure all registered voters are present and correct.

“At any other point in the year, family members of missing persons can get away with lying or bribing surveillance agents, saying that the person they are looking for is trading in another district’s market,” said New Focus International, a defector-run website dedicated to North Korean news.

“But it is during an election period that a North Korean individual’s escape to China or South Korea becomes exposed,” it said.

Kim Jong-un has ramped up border security in an effort to curb defections, but more than 1,500 made it to South Korea last year via China.

Ahn Chan-il, a former defector who heads the World Institute for North Korea Studies in Seoul, said the crackdown was undermining the accuracy of the census, with many local officials not daring to report people missing from their neighbourhood.

“Otherwise, they would find themselves in trouble as it’s their responsibility,” Ahn told AFP.

KUALA LUMPUR/PHU QUOC ISLAND, Vietnam — Officials investigating the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner with 239 people on board suspect it may have disintegrated in mid-flight, a senior source said on Sunday, as Vietnam reported a possible sighting of wreckage from the plane.

International police agency Interpol confirmed that at least two passports recorded in its database as lost or stolen were used by passengers on the flight, raising suspicions of foul play.

An Interpol spokeswoman said a check of all documents used to board the plane had revealed more “suspect passports” that were being further investigated. She was unable to say how many, or from which country or countries.

Nearly 48 hours after the last contact with Flight MH370, mystery still surrounded its fate. Malaysia’s air force chief said the Beijing-bound airliner may have turned back from its scheduled route before it vanished from radar screens.

“The fact that we are unable to find any debris so far appears to indicate that the aircraft is likely to have disintegrated at around 35,000 feet,” a source involved in the investigations in Malaysia told Reuters.

If the plane had plunged intact from close to its cruising altitude, breaking up only on impact with the water, search teams would have expected to find a fairly concentrated pattern of debris, said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss the investigation publicly.

Asked about the possibility of an explosion, such as a bomb, the source said there was no evidence yet of foul play and that the aircraft could have broken up due to mechanical causes.

Dozens of military and civilian vessels have been criss-crossing waters beneath the aircraft’s flight path, but have found no confirmed trace of the lost plane, although oil slicks have been reported in the sea south of Vietnam and east of Malaysia.

Late on Sunday, the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam said on its website that a Vietnamese navy plane had spotted an object in the sea suspected of being part of the plane, but that it was too dark to be certain. Search planes were set to return to investigate the suspected debris at daybreak.

Widening search

“The outcome so far is there is no sign of the aircraft,” Malaysian civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said.

“On the possibility of hijack, we are not ruling out any possibility,” he told reporters.

The Malaysian authorities said they were widening the search to cover vast swathes of sea around Malaysia and off Vietnam, and were investigating at least two passengers who were using false identity documents.

The passenger manifest issued by the airline included the names of two Europeans — Austrian Christian Kozel and Italian Luigi Maraldi — who, according to their foreign ministries, were not on the plane. Both had apparently had their passports stolen in Thailand during the past two years.

The BBC reported that the men falsely using their passports had purchased tickets together and were due to fly on to Europe from Beijing, meaning they did not have to apply for a Chinese visa and undergo further checks.

An employee at a travel agency in Pattaya, in Thailand, told Reuters the two had purchased the tickets there.

Interpol maintains a vast database of more than 40 million lost and stolen travel documents and has long urged member countries to make greater use of it to stop people crossing borders on false papers.

The global police organisation confirmed that Kozel’s and Maraldi’s passports had both been added to the database after their theft in 2012 and 2013 respectively. But it said no country had consulted the database to check either of them since the time they were stolen.

“Whilst it is too soon to speculate about any connection between these stolen passports and the missing plane, it is clearly of great concern that any passenger was able to board an international flight using a stolen passport listed in Interpol’s databases,” Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said in a statement.

In a sign that Malaysia’s airport controls may have been breached, Prime Minister Najib Razak said security procedures were being reviewed.

Four suspects

Malaysian Transport Minister Hishamuddin Hussein said authorities were also checking the identities of two other passengers. He said help was also being sought from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). However, an attack was only one of the possibilities being investigated.

“We are looking at all possibilities,” he said. “We cannot jump the gun. Our focus now is to find the plane.”

The 11-year-old Boeing 777-200ER, powered by Rolls-Royce Trent engines, took off at 12:40am on Saturday(1640 GMT Friday) from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board.

It last had contact with air traffic controllers 120 nautical miles off the east coast of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu. Flight tracking website flightaware.com showed it flew northeast after takeoff, climbed to 35,000 ft (10,670 metres) and was still climbing when it vanished from tracking records.

There were no reports of bad weather.

“What we have done is actually look into the recording on the radar that we have and we realised there is a possibility the aircraft did make a turnback,” Rodzali Daud, the Royal Malaysian Air Force chief, told reporters at a news conference.

The search was being extended to the west coast of the Malay peninsula, in addition to a broad expanse of the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam, he said.

Vietnamese naval boats sent from the holiday island of Phu Quoc patrolled stretches of the Gulf of Thailand, scouring the area where an oil slick was spotted by patrol jets just before nightfall on Saturday.

Besides the Vietnamese vessels, Malaysia and neighbouring countries have deployed 34 aircraft and 40 ships in the search. China and the United States have sent ships to help and Washington has also deployed a maritime surveillance plane.

US officials from Boeing, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration were on the way to Asia to help in investigations, NTSB said in a statement. Boeing said it was monitoring the situation but had no further comment.

The airline has said 14 nationalities were among the passengers, including at least 152 Chinese, 38 Malaysians, seven Indonesians, six Australians, five Indians, four French and three Americans.

KIEV/SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine — Warning shots were fired to prevent an unarmed international military observer mission from entering Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimea on Saturday, as new confrontations between Russian and Ukrainian troops raised tension ever higher.

Russia’s seizure of the Black Sea peninsula, which began about 10 days ago, has so far been bloodless, but its forces have become increasingly aggressive towards Ukrainian troops, who are trapped in bases and have offered no resistance.

Tempers have grown hotter in the last two days, since the region’s pro-Moscow leadership declared it part of Russia and announced a March 16 referendum to confirm it.

A spokeswoman for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe said no one was hurt when shots were fired to turn back its mission of more than 40 unarmed observers, who have been invited by Kiev but do not have permission from Crimea’s pro-Russian separatist regional authorities.

They had been turned back twice before, but this was the first time shots were fired.

Kiev’s security council said it had been targeted by hackers in a “massive” denial of service attack designed to cripple its computers. The national news agency was also hit, it said.

President Vladimir Putin declared a week ago that Russia had the right to invade Ukraine to protect Russian citizens, and his parliament has voted to change the law to make it easier to annex territory.

The pro-Moscow authorities have ordered all remaining Ukrainian troop detachments in Crimea to disarm and surrender, but at several locations they have refused to yield.

Overnight, Russian troops drove a truck into a missile defence post in Sevastopol, the home of both their Black Sea Fleet and the Ukrainian navy, and took control of it. A Reuters reporting team at the scene said no one was hurt.

Ukraine’s border service said Russian troops had also seized a border guard outpost in the east of the peninsula overnight, kicking the Ukrainian officers and their families out of their apartments in the middle of the night.

“The situation is changed. Tensions are much higher now. You have to go. You can’t film here,” said a Russian soldier carrying a heavy machinegun, his face covered except for his eyes, at a Ukrainian navy base in Novozernoye.

About 100 armed Russians are keeping watch over the Ukrainians at the base, where a Russian ship has been scuttled at the entrance to keep the Ukrainians from sailing out.

“Things are difficult and the atmosphere has got worse. The Russians threaten us when we go and get food supplies and point their guns at us,” said Vadim Filipenko, the Ukrainian deputy commander at the base.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said on Saturday Poland had evacuated its consulate in Sevastopol due to “continuing disturbances by Russian forces”.

Many hotheads

Moscow denies that the Russian-speaking troops in Crimea are under its command, an assertion Washington dismisses as “Putin’s fiction”. Although they wear no insignia, the troops drive vehicles with Russian military plates and identify themselves as Russian troops to the besieged Ukrainian forces.

A Reuters reporting team saw a convoy of hundreds of Russian troops in about 50 troop trucks, accompanied by armoured vehicles and ambulances, pull into a military base near Simferopol on Saturday.

The United States has announced sanctions against individuals it blames for interfering with Ukrainian territorial integrity, although it has yet to publish the list.

The European Union is also considering sanctions, but this may be much harder to organise for a 28-member bloc that must take decisions unanimously and depends on Russian natural gas.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave no indication of any softening of Moscow’s position on Saturday, insisting that the government in Kiev had been installed in an illegal coup.

Pro-Moscow Crimea leader Sergei Aksyonov said the referendum on union with Russia — due in a week — would not be stopped. It had been called so quickly to avert “provocation”, he said.

“There are many hotheads who are trying to create a destabilised situation in the autonomous republic of Crimea, and because the life and safety of our citizens is the most valuable thing, we have decided to curtail the duration of the referendum and hold it as soon as possible,” he told Russian television.

Aksyonov, whose openly separatist Russian Unity party received just 4 per cent of the vote in Crimea’s last parliamentary election, declared himself provincial leader 10 days ago after armed Russians seized the parliament building.

Crimean opposition parliamentarians say most lawmakers were barred from the besieged building, both for the vote that installed Aksyonov and the one a week later that declared Crimea part of Russia, and the results were falsified. Both votes took place behind closed doors.

Crimea has a narrow ethnic Russian majority, but it is far from clear that most residents want to be ruled from Moscow. When last asked in 1991, they voted narrowly for independence along with the rest of Ukraine. Western countries dismiss the upcoming referendum as illegal and likely to be falsified.

Many in the region do feel deep hostility to Kiev, and since Aksyonov took power supporters of union with Moscow have controlled the streets, waving Russian flags and chanting “Rossiya! Rossiya!”

Nevertheless, many still quietly speak of their alarm at the Russian takeover: “With all these soldiers here, it is like we are living in a zoo,” said Tatyana, 41, an ethnic Russian. “Everyone fully understands this is an occupation.”

The region’s two million population includes more than 250,000 indigenous Tatars, who have returned only since the 1980s after being deported en masse to distant Uzbekistan by Stalin. They are fiercely opposed to Russian annexation.

The referendum is “completely illegitimate. It has no legal basis”, Crimean Tatar leader Refat Chubarev told Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. “Different groups of people with different histories live here. A mathematical majority cannot express the wishes of the population.”

Journalists have been attacked by hostile crowds. The Associated Press said armed men had confiscated TV equipment from one of its crews.

In addition to the Russian troops, the province is prowled by roving bands of “self-defence” forces and Cossacks in fur hats armed with whips, who were bused in from southern Russia.

Russian television and the provincial channel controlled by Aksyonov broadcast relentless accounts of “fascists” in control of the streets in Kiev and of plans by Ukraine to ban the Russian language. Ukrainian television and the region’s only independent station have been switched off.

Gazprom arrears

Putin launched the operation to seize Crimea within days of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich’s flight from the country. Yanukovich was toppled after three months of demonstrations against a decision to spurn a free trade deal with the European Union for closer ties with Russia.

The final week of protests saw around 100 people killed in the streets, many shot by sharpshooters on rooftops.

Ukraine is near bankruptcy, and the West has had to step in to replace $15 billion in loans that Putin had promised to Yanukovich. The European Commission has said it could give Ukraine up to 11 billion euros ($15 billion) in the next couple of years provided it reaches agreement with the IMF, which requires economic reforms that Yanukovich had resisted.

Promises of billions of dollars in Western aid for Kiev, and the perception that Putin has held back from ordering troops beyond Crimea into other parts of Ukraine, have helped reverse a rout of the local hryvnia currency.

Russian gas monopoly Gazprom said Ukraine had not paid its $440 million gas bill for February, bringing its arrears to $1.89 billion, and hinted it could turn off the taps.

In Moscow, a huge crowd gathered near the Kremlin on Friday at a government-sanctioned rally and concert billed as being “in support of the Crimean people”. Pop stars took to the stage and demonstrators held signs with slogans such as “Crimea is Russian land” and “We believe in Putin”.

KUALA LUMPUR/HO CHI MINH CITY — A Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew was presumed to have crashed off the Vietnamese coast on Saturday and European officials said two people on board were using false identities.

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.

“We are not ruling out any possibilities,” Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told a news conference.

By the early hours of Sunday, there were no confirmed signs of the plane or any wreckage, more than 24 hours after it went missing. Operations will continue through the night, officials said.

There were no indications of sabotage nor claims of a terrorist attack. But the passenger manifest issued by the airline included the names of two Europeans — Austrian Christian Kozel and Italian Luigi Maraldi — who, according to their foreign ministries, were not in fact on the plane.

A foreign ministry spokesman in Vienna said: “Our embassy got the information that there was an Austrian on board. That was the passenger list from Malaysia Airlines. Our system came back with a note that this is a stolen passport.”

Austrian police had found the man safe at home. The passport was stolen two years ago while he was travelling in Thailand, the spokesman said.

The foreign ministry in Rome said no Italian was on the plane either, despite the inclusion of Maraldi’s name on the list. His mother, Renata Lucchi, told Reuters his passport was lost, presumed stolen, in Thailand in 2013.

The 11-year-old Boeing, powered by Rolls-Royce Trent engines, took off at 12:40am (1640 GMT Friday) from Kuala Lumpur International Airport and was apparently flying in good weather conditions when it went missing without a distress call.

A crash, if confirmed, would likely mark the US-built airliner’s deadliest incident since entering service 19 years ago. It would also be the second fatal accident involving a Boeing 777 in less than a year.

An Asiana Airlines Boeing 777-200ER crash-landed in San Francisco in July 2013, killing three passengers and injuring more than 180.

Boeing said it was monitoring the situation but had no further comment.

Paul Hayes, director of safety at Flightglobal Ascend aviation consultancy, said the flight would normally have been at a routine stage, having apparently reached its initial cruise altitude of 35,000 feet.

“Such a sudden disappearance would suggest either that something is happening so quickly that there is no opportunity to put out a mayday, in which case a deliberate act is one possibility to consider, or that the crew is busy coping with whatever has taken place,” he told Reuters.

He said it was too early to speculate on the causes.

A large number of planes and ships from several countries were scouring the area where the plane last made contact, about halfway between Malaysia and the southern tip of Vietnam.

“The search and rescue operations will continue as long as necessary,” Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak told reporters. He said his country had deployed 15 air force aircraft, six navy ships and three coast guard vessels.

Search and rescue vessels from the Malaysian maritime enforcement agency reached the area where the plane last made contact but saw no sign of wreckage, the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency said.

Vietnam said its rescue planes had spotted two large oil slicks, about 15 km long, and a column of smoke off its coastline, but it was not clear if they were connected to the missing plane.

China and the Philippines also sent ships to the region to help, while the United States, the Philippines and Singapore dispatched military planes. China has also put other ships and aircraft on standby, said Transport Minister Yang Chuantang.

Nos distress call

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, CEO Yahya said.

Flight tracking website flightaware.com showed it flew northeast over Malaysia after takeoff, climbed to 35,000 feet and was still climbing when it vanished from the site’s tracking records a minute later.

John Goglia, a former board member of the National Transportation Safety Board, the US agency that investigates plane crashes, said the lack of a distress call suggested that the plane either experienced an explosive decompression or was destroyed by an explosive device.

“It had to be quick because there was no communication,” Goglia said.

He said the false identities of the two passengers strongly suggested the possibility of a bomb.

“That’s a big red flag,” he said.

If there were passengers on board with stolen passports, it was not clear how they passed through security checks.

International police body Interpol maintains a database of more than 39 million travel documents reported lost or stolen by 166 countries and says on its website that this enables police, immigration or border control officers to check the validity of a suspect document within seconds. No comment was immediately available from the organisation.

Relatives angry

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters in Beijing that China was “extremely worried” about the fate of the plane and those on board.

The airline said people of 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.

Chinese relatives of passengers angrily accused the airline of keeping them in the dark, while state media criticised the carrier’s response as poor.

“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, once it was identified.

About 20-30 families were being kept in a holding room at the airport, where they were being guarded by security officials and kept away from reporters.

Malaysia Airlines has one of the best safety records among full-service carriers in the Asia-Pacific region.

It identified the pilot of MH370 as Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a 53-year-old Malaysian who joined the carrier in 1981 and has 18,365 hours of flight experience.

ISTANBUL — Former army chief Ilker Basbug was released from a life sentence following a court decision on Friday, adding to uncertainty over the fate of court cases trying coup plots against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The decision to release the former general came after Thursday’s constitutional court ruling that Basbug’s incarceration for his alleged role in the “Ergenekon” conspiracy to overthrow the government violated his rights, as the court trying him had failed to publish a detailed verdict on the case.

Basbug was released from Silivri prison near Istanbul where he had been held for 26 months in connection with the Ergenekon case, a trial which helped tame Turkey’s once all-powerful military.

Speaking in Silivri outside Istanbul in front of scores of supporters waving red Turkish flags, cheering and chanting, an emotional Basbug recalled his anger and shock that the head of the Turkish armed forces was being remanded in custody as the leader of a terrorist group.

“Those who acted with hatred and revenge kept us here for 26 months. They stole 26 months from my life,” he said.

Basbug’s release could be a precedent for more than 200 other defendants jailed over the Ergenekon affair.

“This verdict is very important, but unfortunately we were only now able to correct the injustice... after more than two years’ imprisonment,” Basbug’s lawyer Ilkay Sezer told reporters outside the Istanbul court house.

“There are many more people in jails who are suffering severe health problems and who have been victims of these courts. I hope that, as soon as possible, their cases will also be resolved with release orders.”

The five-year trial, which reached a verdict last August, was key to a decade-long battle between Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted AK Party and a secularist elite that had led modern Turkey from its foundation in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Erdogan is now engaged in a power struggle with a former ally, US-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom he accuses of using influence in the judiciary and police to orchestrate a corruption investigation targeting the government. Gulen denies this.

ANKARA — Turkey’s embattled prime minister has warned that his government could ban popular social media networks YouTube and Facebook after a number of online leaks added momentum to a spiralling corruption scandal.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s proposals to tighten his government’s grip over the Internet have generated criticism at home and abroad about rights in the EU-hopeful country.

“There are new steps we will take in that sphere after March 30... including a ban [on YouTube, Facebook],” Erdogan told private ATV television in an interview late Thursday.

In stark contrast, President Abdullah Gul, a frequent social media user, said YouTube and Facebook cannot be unplugged.

“YouTube and Facebook are recognised platforms all over the world. A ban is out of the question,” he told reporters on Friday.

The president in Turkey is however a largely ceremonial figure.

Erdogan, Turkey’s all-powerful leader since 2003, has been under mounting pressure after audio recordings were leaked last month in which he and his son allegedly discuss how to hide vast sums of money.

The Turkish premier dismissed them as a “vile” and an “immoral” montage by rivals ahead of key local elections on March 30. His office claimed the recordings were “completely untrue”.

Media boss in tears

Erdogan’s government has been shaken by a high-level corruption scandal that erupted in mid-December and ensnared the premier’s key political and business allies.

Erdogan has waged a war against ally-turned-opponent Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric based in the United States with strong influence over the country’s police and the judiciary, of orchestrating the graft probe.

He has accused so-called “Gulenists” of acting like a “parallel state” and vowed to cleanse the state of the movement’s supporters by purging police and passing laws to increase his grip over the Internet and the judiciary.

“Social media has turned into a domain for quite some time where the battle between the loyalists of the frustrated prime minister and the alleged ‘parallel state’ is in full swing,” Asli Tunc, professor at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, told AFP.

“The government is seeking to find channels to shut down the social media which leaks tapes or dissident views. People cling to social media tools like Twitter for their news because the mainstream media or TVs are cowering in fear,” she said.

A series of other leaks on YouTube showed Erdogan allegedly meddling in business deals, court cases and even media coverage.

In the latest audio tape posted on YouTube on Thursday, a voice purportedly of Erdogan is heard reprimanding businessman Erdogan Demiroren after his Milliyet newspaper published a 2013 article on the fragile peace talks with Kurdish rebels.

‘Did we upset you?’ asks Demiroren.

The voice allegedly of Erdogan calls both the reporter and the editor who published the story “dishonourable”, with the businessman promising that he would find the source and disclose it to the premier.

Demiroren is later heard bursting into tears under pressure to fire his two journalists, crying, “How did I end up in this business?”

Erdogan’s latest threat about Facebook and YouTube is a reflection of his political frustration in the run up to elections, according to Tunc, but she said the premier was also known for his intolerance toward the social media.

Erdogan is openly suspicious of the Internet, branding Twitter a “menace” last year for helping organise mass anti-government protests in which eight people died and thousands were injured.

“I don’t have that much time to waste in Twitter,” he said last month.

Access to thousands of websites have been blocked in recent years in Turkey.

YouTube was previously banned for two years until 2010 because of material deemed insulting to the country’s still-revered founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Further Internet curbs allowed the authorities to keep a record of someone’s web activity for up to two years and block sites deemed insulting or as invading privacy.

Critics say however that the latest curbs are aimed at preventing further details from the corruption scandal being leaked online.

The European Union has voiced its “concerns” that the Internet law would limit freedom of expression, urging Ankara to ensure compliance with the bloc’s standards.