19-year-old “Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad”, is also believed to be travelling to Germany where he is hoping to seek asylum.
“We have been checking his background. We have also compared his profile with our counterparts from other countries. We believe he is not likely to be a member of any terrorist group,” said Khalid.
At a press conference at 3pm Tuesday, Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar said that the Iranian has used the passport of Austrian Christian Kozel which had been confirmed as stolen in Phuket, Thailand.
Khalid said that police were still investigating the other passenger using another stolen passport, listed under the name Luigi Maraldi of Italy.
Previously, both men had reported their passports stolen in Thailand over the past two years. It was also reported that the two were on their way to Amsterdam.
“You ask me how I know he wanted to migrate to Germany? We are in contact with his mother, she was expecting him to arrive in Frankfurt, that is why we knew he was the one,” he said, adding that the Pouria's mother was aware he was using a false passport.
While authorities earlier said that a main angle was that the two was linked to a passport stealing syndicate, Khalid said that it was “too early to come to a conclusion” but said that they were “working closely with Thai counterparts.”
On Interpol’s criticism that Malaysia and other countries had not checked their database before clearing people using false passports, Khalid said that the authorities worked closely.
“There are more than 14 million reports of stolen passports in the dataset, we have to work by intelligence. As I said, we have no prior intelligence of activities of terrorists, (that’s why) the two stolen passports were not supplied to the immigration department,” he said.
