Don't really think anything of it, which could be as simple as picking up the wrong pass from the desk to hand over, and then accounting determining who was on the flight from the records of the gate card scanner.
What is dismaying is this journalism line that with the slightest admin issue we are all going to be murdered by a dangerous psychopath, plus the airline's attitude of cancelling all the rest of the fully paid trip (and keeping the money) through some such error of their own making, then denying it.