And two passengers boarded using stolen passports: Pouria Nourmohammadi Mehrdad, 19, and Seyed Mohammed Reza Delavar, 29, Iranian men described by Interpol as migrants being smuggled into Europe.
Mohammad Mallaeibasir, 18, an information technology student in Kuala Lumpur, said the pair stayed in his apartment the night before they left. Mr. Mehrdad, a friend from high school in Tehran, told him he was starting a new life in Hamburg, Germany, where his mother was waiting. He was quite nervous, Mr. Mallaeibasir recalled. I could see it on his face.
The next night, he drove them to the airport and offered to help them check in, but
they insisted on entering separately, Mr. Delavar first. The two high school buddies waited in the car for five to 10 minutes, smoking cigarettes, before Mr. Mehrdad got out to leave.
Mr. Mallaeibasir gave him a hug, told him to have a safe flight and watched as his friend carried a
large backpack and a laptop computer bag into the terminal. That was the last he saw of him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/w...l-both-routine-and-flight-vanish.html?hp&_r=0
By Sunday afternoon, a team of Inmarsat engineers set to work using the principles of trigonometry to determine the distance between the satellite and the plane at the time of each ping, and then to calculate two rough flight paths. The plane, they concluded, had turned again. But it may have then traveled in more or less a straight line, heading north over countries likely to have picked it up on radar, or south toward the Indian Ocean and Antarctica.
