MH370: New items wash ashore on Reunion Island

The analysis will begin on Wednesday.

The plane was last detected by air traffic controllers about an hour into its flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8, 2014. “But we do not want to speculate”, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told Reuters on Saturday.

Malaysian authorities on Friday also said that the debris comes from a Boeing 777.

For family members of the passengers who have been waiting for more than a year, as hard as it may be, closure could come soon.

Investigators believe someone deliberately switched off MH370’s transponder before diverting it thousands of miles off course.

The two-metre segment will be shipped late on Friday from Reunion, east of Madagascar, to arrive in the French city of Toulouse on Saturday, said the spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office.

“There’s strong evidence to suggest that the wreckage found on Reunion Island does come from a Boeing 777″, said Warren Truss, Australian Deputy Prime Minister.

While officials have not confirmed the link to the missing Malaysian flight, they do have a high confidence the debris belongs to a Boeing 777, and MH370 is the only Boeing 777 thought to have crashed south of the equator.

A BBC report says the object may have a data tag with a serial number that could be directly traceable to MH370.

The piece of wreckage – known as a flaperon or wing component – arrived at Paris’ Orly earlier in the day on an Air France flight from the island of Reunion.

Jacquita Gomes, whose husband Patrick was a flight attendant on the plane, said she is torn about whether to believe the debris found is the first concrete evidence that her husband is truly gone.

Airline recovery expert Steve Saint Amour said he’s not surprised at the distance between that route and the spot where the debris was found.

The flaperon bears the part number 657 BB, according to photographs of the debris, which Abdul Aziz said identified it as coming from a 777.

Australian Jeanette Maguire, whose sister Cathy was on board, said the discovery of the wreckage was “a very bittersweet feeling for all of the family, it’s quite emotional”.

“In a sense, this is the first positive sign that we have located part of that plane”, Ms Bishop told Channel Seven today.

If the debris is confirmed to be from MH370, experts will try to retrace its drift back to where the bulk of the plane likely sank on impact.

There were 239 passengers and crew on board, majority Chinese.