The piece of aircraft believed to be from a Malaysian Airlines jet that mysteriously disappeared 17 months ago arrived in France early Saturday for examination by lab experts.
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Experts in Toulouse will begin work to determine whether the part came from the missing Boeing 777 on Wednesday, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
A wing flap suspected to be from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was on Reunion.
However Malaysia urged authorities in the Indian Ocean region to be on the lookout for debris washing up on their shores as hope flared a piece of a Boeing 777 wing could help solve one of aviation s greatest mysteries.
Initially it was reported to be part of a plane door, but officials said it turned out to be a “domestic ladder”.
The chief of the French Civil Aviation Authority for Réunion was present as the teams carried away the debris, which will be now undergo further analysis.
The French General Directorate of Armament, which is analyzing the debris, has sophisticated equipment and expertise to quickly identify the plane the debris belongs to and what happened to it, a source told CNN.
Aviation experts at a military base near Toulouse, France, have been trying to establish whether the original wreckage is from the doomed flight.
He said only three 777s have crashed since 2013 and the other two were in completely different locations.
The Australia-led search for the missing plane in the southern Indian Ocean was to continue regardless of the findings, Australian officials have said. French authorities received the wing segment in France yesterday for analysis.
Malaysia’s transport minister Liow Tiong Lai says in a tweet that the French authorities and Boeing have “officially identified” the flaperon as being part of a 777.
On the island, a memorial service was held at a church just down the road from where the wreckage was discovered.
The jetliner vanished on March 8, 2014 after leaving Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for Beijing.
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Investigators believe someone on board MH370 may have switched off its transponder, which allows it to be located, before flying it thousands of miles away from its intended course. “So we have to verify those”, said Liow.The minister said now the first priority is the identification job and appealed people not to speculate randomly.
