Iranian Lawmaker Blames U.S. for Plane Disappearance

NY Times - With the fate and location of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet still unexplained on Tuesday, the police were investigating the possibilities of hijacking, sabotage and possible psychological or personal problems among the crew and passengers, while other agencies in Malaysia continued to investigate noncriminal explanations, as Thomas Fuller, Jane Perlez and Alan Cowell reported.

On Tuesday, an influential Iranian lawmaker accused the United States of having “kidnapped” Flight 370, saying it was an attempt to “sabotage the relationship between Iran and China and South East Asia.”

The parliamentarian, Hossein Naghavi Hosseini, who is the spokesman for the foreign policy committee, responded to the news on Tuesday that two Iranian nationals had been traveling on the missing flight holding stolen passports. This accusation was a “plot,” Mr. Naghavi Hosseini said, according to the Tasnim news agency.

“Documents published by the Western media about two Iranians getting on the plane without passports is psychological warfare. Americans recruit some people for such kinds of operations so they can throw the blame on other countries, especially Muslim countries,” he said.

Thousands of Iranians, if not more, wait in Asian countries with friendly visa rules to make journeys to the West and to Australia. Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia in particular are popular springboards for middle-class Iranians who enter on tourist visas and are then helped by local travel agents and human smugglers to travel to Western countries.

Interpol had confirmed on Sunday that two passports, an Austrian and an Italian, were recorded in its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (S.L.T.D.) database and were used by passengers on board Flight 370.

On Tuesday, Ronald K. Noble, Interpol’s secretary general, said the two men’s identities were confirmed by Iranian authorities as Seyed Mohammed Reza Delavar, 29, and Pouria Nourmohammadi, 18.

He said the Iranian authorities had also determined that neither of the men had a criminal record and that both had left Iran legally.

The Malaysian police gave the Iranian teenager’s full name as Pouria Nourmohammadi Mehrdad.

Khalid Abu Bakar, the inspector general of the Malaysian police, said he was using a passport that had been stolen from an Austrian man and was traveling to Germany, where he was to meet his mother.

On Tuesday Iran’s foreign ministry said it was ready to cooperate in the investigations.

“We have received information on possible presence of two Iranians among the plane’s crews. We are pursuing the issue,” said Marzieh Afkham, the Iranian foreign ministry spokeswoman. “We have informed our embassy in Malaysia that we are ready to receive further information about the issue from Malaysian officials. We have announced that we were ready for cooperation.”

By THOMAS ERDBRINK