According to information obtained by the Bangkok Post, the tickets were reserved electronically from Iran.
The tickets were bought from China Southern Airlines, as they operate a code-sharing service with Malaysian Airlines. They were paid for in Thai baht. The ticket numbers are contiguous, indicating they were issued together.
The two passports in question belong to Italian national Luigi Maraldi and Austrian Christian Kozel. Both men are alive and were not on board flight MH370 when it disappeared en route to Beijing.
Pol Lt Col Ratchtapong Tiasut, Chon Buri Immigration Office’s deputy superintendent in charge of investigations, confirmed his team of investigators discovered that the two agencies – Grand Horizon in South Pattaya and Six Stars Travel at Central Plaza Pattaya – received an email order for the booking and purchase of the two tickets on Thursday.
Pattaya police on Monday travelled to the tour agency in South Pattaya and sought its cooperation in collecting documents to help with their investigations.
Pol Lt Col Ratchtapong said the agency in South Pattaya had received the order initially and later asked its partner agency at Central Plaza Pattaya to obtain the tickets.
After Six Stars Travel contacted China Southern Airlines in Bangkok, tickets were issued for the two passengers on the same day.
“We have yet to find who booked and bought the tickets for these two people. It may have been themselves or their friends in Thailand,’’ Pol Lt Col Ratchtapong said.
“As soon as we have more information we will be able to piece the story together and at least know how many people were involved and their identities.’’
The two flights booked with China Southern Airlines had their point of origin in Kuala Lumpur. They were scheduled to fly to Beijing and then onward to Amsterdam. The ticked booked with the Italian passport was to fly onward to Copenhagen and that booked with the Austrian passport continued on to Frankfurt.
The Bangkok Post managed to contact an officer at one of the travel agencies involved in the case.
The officer, who declined to disclose his name, admitted his company had received an email order to book the two flights from an Iranian man who called himself ‘’Ali’’.
The officer said he knew Mr Ali personally, from Mr Ali’s previous trips to Pattaya where he runs a business. Mr Ali had often asked his company to book flight tickets for he and his friends while staying in Pattaya.
He said Mr Ali had sent the order to his company from Iran.
He said in Mr Ali’s first email, he asked the company to book tickets on Etihad Airways or Qatar Airways, flying to Copenhagen and Frankfurt.
However, the two tickets were so expensive that Mr Ali decided to buy the tickets from China Southern Airlines for 25,500 baht each, he said.
The tour officer said Mr Ali asked his friend in Thailand to pay for the tickets in Thai baht.
He said he had already given an account of how his company had sold the tickets to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.
‘’It’s hard for me to say at this moment whether Mr Ali and his friends who paid for the tickets are involved in a suspected terror attack on the Malaysian plane or not because he is just a foreign customer of my company,’’ he said.
Malaysia’s interior minister said the two passengers using the missing passports had “Asian facial features”.
“I am still puzzled why the [immigration officers] did not wonder why the Italian and Austrian had Asian facial features,” Home Minister Zahid Hamidi was quoted as saying late on Sunday by Malaysia’s national news agency Bernama.
Immigration commissioner Pol Lt Gen Pharnu Kerdlarpphon said on Monday immigration police had voided the passports belonging to the Italian and Austrian tourists when they had reported the loss of the documents and no one had used them to exit Thailand.
The immigration chief admitted that as Thailand was a popular tourist destination, it could be used as a base for passport forgery, which authorities were trying to suppress.
Pol Lt Gen Pharnu had not considered that the stolen passports might be used in a terrorist plot. He said fake passports tend to be used by illegal migrants who might be seeking jobs in a third-party country.
Pol Lt Gen Pharnu also admitted that passports lost in Thailand could be used in other countries because databases on stolen passports had not been connected globally.
As both stolen passports were used to buy air tickets online from agents in Pattaya City, Pol Lt Gen Pharnu said such agents could not detect the movement of customers holding voided passports as they did not have access to immigration police databases.
According to the Immigration Bureau, foreigners report 1,000 passports lost and stolen in Thailand a year. The losses result from forgetfulness, passports being dropped in water and theft.
Lost and stolen passports are mainly issued in Russia, Britain, France, China, South Korea, the United States, Japan, Germany, Austria and Canada.
Read the original story here.