Analysis | As missing Malaysian flight shows, fake travel documents pose threat

Despite a full-scale multinational search-and-rescue operation, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, carrying 239 passengers and crew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, remains missing. The Chinese government and its people are particularly frustrated with the slow progress of the investigation, because almost two-thirds of the passengers came from China.

After the mysterious disappearance, reports emerged that two Europeans listed on the passenger manifest were not aboard. The exposure immediately raised a fear that the users of two stolen passports could have boarded the craft to launch a terrorist attack.

The fear was compounded by the fact that, one week before, terrorists launched a heinous attack in the southwest Chinese city of Kunming that left 29 people dead and 143 others injured.

Even worse, the disappearance coincided with the attention-grabbing annual sessions of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in Beijing, the destination of the flight.

Although Interpol tends to believe that the two Iranian passengers travelling on stolen passports were not involved in terrorism, there are many other security analyses pointing to a high probability of terrorism. Investigators from Malaysia, China and other countries have not ruled out terrorism as a cause of the air tragedy.

In particular, China is not unfamiliar with terrorist violence targeted at its civil aviation.

In March 2008, a 19-year-old Uygur woman boarded China Southern Airlines flight CZ6901 with a hidden bottle of flammable liquid. When the aircraft was en route from Urumqi to Beijing, she was found to be trying to set it on fire. The plane had to make an emergency landing in Lanzhou . Two men were also detained for being involved in the foiled attack.