SEPANG, June 11 ― Malaysia has begun checking the validity of all travel documents passing through airport immigration counters against the databases of Interpol and the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said today.
The Home Minister said the country agreed to the arrangement with ICAO after the Immigration Department formally became a member of the global aviation body recently.
“The Immigration Department has already joined ICAO and will now check the validity of passports against ICAO's database which is set up in Ontario, Canada,” he said at a working visit to KLIA2.
Malaysia, through the police, are also working closely with Interpol to access the world police's database on lost and stolen documents, Zahid said.
He noted that this will be monitored in real time, along with an existing list of suspects that will be checked against Interpol's own list.
Zahid said they are currently working on also upgrading the immigration process to include passport scanners and a facial recognition system to weed out impersonators or any individual using stolen or lost passports.
“This (system) will also include foreign passports, to avoid a repeat of the two passports used by other people in the case of MH370,” he said.
It was discovered during the early days of the probe into flight MH370 that two Iranians used stolen passports to board the plane.
Zahid told Parliament in March that the two Iranians had bought the stolen Austrian and Italian passports in Phuket, Thailand and were using it to gain unimpeded access to Europe.
He, however, stressed that there was no indication that they were either terrorists or asylum seekers, and that they had only wanted to stay in Europe.
