KUALA LUMPUR/PHU QUOC ISLAND, Vietnam, March 9 (Reuters) - Malaysia Airlines said it was "fearing the worst" on Sunday for a plane carrying 239 people that went missing more than 24 hours ago, as the government said it was investigating four passengers who may have held false identity documents.
There were no reports of bad weather and no sign of why Flight MH370 would have vanished from radar screens off the coast of Vietnam about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing early on Saturday morning.
* Malaysia Airlines says "fearing the worst"
* Flight lost contact hour after takeoff, no distress signal or sign of bad weather
* KL-Beijing flight carried 227 passengers and 12 crew
* Two passengers, possibly more, were travelling under false identities
The 'unprecedented mystery' behind the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 deepened on Monday when relatives claimed they were able to call the cellphones of their missing loved ones.
According to the Washington Post, family of some of the 239 people on board the vanished Boeing 777 said that they were getting ring tones and could see them active online through a Chinese social networking service called QQ.
One man said that the QQ account of his brother-in-law showed him as online, but frustratingly for those waiting desperately for any news, messages sent have gone unanswered and the calls have not been picked up.
This new eerie development comes as the Malaysian authorities said they had identified one of the men on two stolen European passports who were on the flight - and that he was not considered likely to be a terrorist
He was a 19-year-old Iranian asylum seeker called Pouiria Nur Mohammad Mehrdad who was trying to meet his mother in Germany.
US officials believe that two communications systems aboard Malaysian Airlines flight 370 were shut down separately, 14 minutes apart - meaning that the plane did not come down because of a catastrophic failure. The data reporting system was shut down at 1.07 am and the transponder was turned off at 1.21 am just before the Boeing 777 apparently changed course and turned west. According to investigators this indicated that the switch-off could have been a deliberate act and officials told ABC News that the two communications devices were 'systematically shut down'. That has led the US investigating team to become 'convinced there was manual intervention' which in turn means it was not an accident or massive malfunction that caused the plane to cease to be airborne.
