Interpol knew about stolen passports that two passengers used to board an ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight bound for China, but no country checked the police agency’s vast database on stolen documents beforehand, it said Sunday. Interpol said it hopes authorities will “learn from the tragedy.”
It’s not known whether stolen passports had anything to do with Saturday’s disappearance of the Boeing 777 bound from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board. But such oversights aren’t new. Last year, passengers boarded planes over a billion times without their passports being checked against Interpol’s database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, said the international organization based in Lyon, France. . .