Two passengers listed as being on the Malaysia Airlines flight which has gone missing were not on board, according to Reuters.
The two men, one from Austria and one from Italy, were confirmed by their countries on Saturday as not being on board and one of the men had their passport stolen recently, Reuters reported.
According to the passenger manifest, which went missing off the Vietnamese coast, 227 passengers, including 12 crew members, were aboard and Christian Kozel, 30, from Austria, and Luigi Maraldi, 37, from Italy were listed as having been checked-in and on board the plane, according to Reuters.
"Our embassy got the information that there was an Austrian on board. That was the passenger list from Malaysia Airlines. Our system came back with a note that this is a stolen passport," according to a foreign ministry spokesman in Vienna, Reuters reported.
Police say they found the man at his home and reported his passport was stolen two years ago while he was travelling in Thailand, the spokesman said, according to Reuters. The foreign ministry in Rome said no Italian was on the plane either, despite the inclusion of Maraldi's name on the list.
The Austrian Foreign Ministry spokesman said: "It's interesting that there were two cases on the same plane but we just know that our Austrian was not on board. Someone used a document to get on the plane. But whoever used that, we have nothing to say about that, we don't know, that would be for the authorities to look into," he said, Reuters reported.
The Boeing 777-200ER vanished about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur as it was headed for Beijing, according to Reuters. There are no reports of bad weather in the flights path and there are no signs of sabotage or reports of a terrorist attack.
