PARIS — When you travel, airport security agents might pat you down, inspect your deodorant and scan your body. But there’s a good chance no one’s checking whether you’re using a lost or stolen passport.
A gaping, if little-known, loophole in international aviation security came into broader view Sunday when the international police agency Interpol said its computer systems had contained information on the theft of two passports that were used to board an ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight — but no national authorities had checked the database.
Largely unheeded, Interpol has long sounded the alarm that growing international travel has underpinned a new market for identity theft and bogus passports that has lured many people: illegal immigrants, terrorists, drug runners, pretty much anyone looking to travel unnoticed.
It’s not known whether stolen passports had anything to do with the disappearance Saturday of the Boeing 777 bound from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board. But such oversights aren’t new — and Interpol hopes national authorities will “learn from the tragedy.”
More than 1 billion times last year, travelers boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol’s database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, the Lyon-based police body said.
Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said in a statement Sunday that it has long asked why countries would “wait for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates.”
Officials cite recent instances of use of stolen travel documents:
• A war crimes suspect tried to attend a conference in Congo but was instead arrested.
• The killer of the Serbian prime minister crossed 27 borders on a missing passport before he was caught.
• Samantha Lewthwaite, the former wife of one of the suicide bombers in the 2005 attack on London’s transit system, escaped capture when she produced a fraudulently obtained South African passport.
Sometimes, authorities are outmatched: Ticket-buying regulations and border control techniques vary from country to country, and an Interpol official said there’s no one-size-fits-all explanation for why some countries don’t use its database systematically.
The Interpol stolen or lost travel documents database draws on information from 167 countries. It was searched more than 800 million times last year — but one in eight searches was conducted by the United Arab Emirates alone. The U.S. and Britain are other big users, and France and Switzerland routinely check it too, Interpol officials said.
