WARNING ! MISSING MALAYSIA AIRLINES MH370 - Strange Flight Radar. Flight Shot Down by Military?

Malaysia Airlines crash: terror fear over four mystery passengers on missing plane MH370
Air safety experts investigate whether terrorism was behind the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight which vanished over the South China Sea

Air safety experts are investigating whether an airliner that mysteriously vanished in the Far East could have been the target of a terrorist attack.

More than twenty-four hours after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared over the South China Sea, the only clue to the fate of its 239 passengers and crew was the revelation that the identities of four people on board, including two using stolen passports, were being investigated.

The disclosure raised fears that terrorists could have used false passports to board the craft, which vanished with no prior signals of trouble to air traffic controllers.

Those fears increased when Malaysian authorities later confirmed that they were liaising with the FBI over the suspect identities. The four under suspicion had all bought their flight tickets through China Southern Airlines, said a security official.

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The plane was heading from the Malaysia to China, where last week 33 people were killed and 143 injured in a terrorist attack in the south-western city of Kunming. The attack, in which a gang of men ran amok in a Chinese railway station, was blamed on pro-separatist ethnic Uigurs, who come from the mainly Muslim areas of the Xinjiang region that borders Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some Chinese media have branded it the country's own "9-11".

Officials stressed that it was too early to say whether terrorism was a likely cause of the Malaysia airlines crash. But US officials said the FBI was checking passenger manifests and going back through intelligence.

"We are aware of the reporting on the two stolen passports," one senior official told NBC news. "We have not determined a nexus to terrorism yet, although it's still very early, and that's by no means definitive."

A leading aviation safety expert also said that it was "extraordinary" that the pilots of the jetliner did not have time to make a distress call.

David Learmount, of the specialist aviation magazine Flight Global, said that as the plane was cruising at about 35,000 feet when it lost contact over the South China sea, the pilots would normally have had "plenty of time" to radio in any technical problems before the plane hit the water.

Chris Yates, another aviation expert, said: "There will be two areas for the investigation: the maintenance of the aircraft and also possible terrorism.

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Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser, Tony Blinken, has told CNN that the US is looking into reports that two passengers on flight MH370 were using stolen passports.

He said it was premature to speculate whether the passengers had a role in the Boeing 777's disappearance.

Blinken also said investigators from the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are heading to Asia to assist in the investigation.