Malaysian transport minister Liow Tiong Lai added to the confusion, saying a Malaysian team had found more debris on the island, including a window and some aluminium foil, and had sent the material to local authorities for French investigators to examine.
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Window panes and seat cushions had also been found near Reunion which were yet to be identified, he said.
“I am suspicious of Malaysia airlines because they have a track record of going back and forth of what they is true and not true”, said Jiang Hui, whose mother was on Flight 370.
The French decision came as Malaysia also appealed to the governments of Mauritius and Madagascar east of Reunion to help widen the search area.
Malaysian PM Najib Razak said experts in France had “conclusively confirmed” the wing part found on an island in the Indian Ocean was from the aircraft.
The Malaysia Airlines flight, with 239 people – including 153 Chinese citizens – on board, vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March last year, and authorities said it went down in the southern Indian Ocean.
France launched a hunt for more wreckage from the ill-fated MH370 plane off Reunion island on Friday in a fresh effort to shed light on one of aviation’s biggest mysteries.
Some family members of passengers criticize officials’ announcements.
On Friday morning, islanders reported a Casa plane overflying the zone around the Saint André beach where the flaperon was discovered nine days ago.
Australian authorities, which are leading the search, expressed renewed confidence that they were looking in the right area.
“If they recover additional pieces and additional evidence, there could be a different dynamic from the legal perspective concerning airline manufacturers”, Alexander said. “I don’t believe this latest information about the plane, they have been lying to us from the beginning”, said Zhang Yongli, whose daughter was on the plane. On Monday, Malaysia’s anti-corruption agency said that $700 million in Najib’s personal bank accounts came from donations, not from a debt-ridden state investment fund.
“Debris such as the flaperon can only increase our understanding of the last seconds of the flight”, said Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at industry publication Flightglobal.
Investigators had already determined that it came from a Boeing 777, and Flight 370 was the only plane of that model missing in the world.
Najib delivered the news on national television in Malaysia.
“We request that the Malaysian government give us an explanation for this”, said Cheng Liping, whose husband was on board MH370, referring to the discrepancy.
Q. How will the forensic study of the debris tell us more about what happened to the plane?
France is to conduct air, land and sea searches in and around the island of Reunion in hope of finding more debris which could be linked to MH370.
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For months, searchers have extrapolated the plane’s possible crash site from an enormous arc of ocean that is now a 120,000-square-kilometer (46,000-square-mile) search zone.
