Plane Part Arrives at French Laboratory for MH370 Link Probe

Bishop said she was hopeful it could provide insight into what happened to the Malaysia Airlines flight, which disappeared on March 8 last year en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Reunion is roughly 3,700 km (2,300 miles) from the broad expanse of the southern Indian Ocean off Australia where search efforts have focused, but Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said currents could have carried wreckage that way.

Officials examine debris found washed up on Reunion island east of Madagascar to determine if it is related to the missing MH370.

Earlier, Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said the agency was “increasingly confident that this debris is from MH370″.

AUSTRALIA continues to shoulder most of the cost of searching for the vanished passenger jet, though China – which had 153 nationals aboard – is yet to contribute financially to the underwater search.

“French investigators now hold a key piece of evidence, believed to be a wing part, known as a flaperon, that could be from the missing Boeing 777″.

The wreckage has the part number “657 BB” visible, according to photos of the debris.

Technicians will look for DNA on a suitcase fragment found on Reunion Island, the French territory where plane debris possibly connected to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 washed up, officials say. A Boeing 777 aircraft maintenance manual available online showed that the number was linked to a part called the “Flaperon leading edge panel” on the left wing of the plane.

Relatives said in a statement that, even if the wreckage is confirmed to be part of missing MH370, it should not dampen the resolve to find the rest of the wreckage, the whereabouts of all passengers and the reasons for its disappearance.

Johnny Begue, the man who discovered the flaperon on the shores of the island of Reunion, states that upon seeing the debris, he immediately assumed that it was from an air crash.

“We are still working with our French and Malaysian colleagues to analyse all the information, so we don’t have certainty yet, but we hope that within the next little while we’ll be able to get to that level of confidence”.

A piece of luggage, a detergent bottle with Indonesian writing and a Chinese bottle of water have also been found on the same island, Daily Mail reports.