French authorities have formally confirmed that a piece of debris found on the French island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean in July belongs to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Advertisement
French prosecutors declared Thursday that the wing half was ” from Flight MH370.
“We’ve been engaged on the idea that the flaperon was related to MH370”, Dolan informed (AFP).
“It’s useful to have formal confirmation of this, so it’s good for us. Nevertheless it hasn’t truly made a big distinction to our search”.
Cigainero also reports that Australian teams continue to search for more debris in an expanse of the Indian Ocean where the plane is believed to have gone down.
“We are now reviewing the options available to us to see whether we will acquire other vessels and equipment for the summer period”, he said. “We’ve not made any selections on that but”. However, discovery of the wing part, known as a flaperon, was the first physical evidence to back investigators’ theory that the aircraft crashed.
“All we know is that the flaperon at some point became detached from the aircraft and there are a range of possible scenarios from that”, he said. “We’ll watch developments clearly however at this stage we’ve not seen something that really assists in refining or altering the search space”.
Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss meanwhile was reported saying that once the area of highest probability had been covered, search operations would end as per agreement with the countries involved.
Australia is leading the hard search in the southern Indian Ocean for the Malaysia Airlines plane which mysteriously diverted off course on March 8 previous year and disappeared with 239 people on board.
Advertisement
The Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement that investigators used maintenance records to match a serial number found on the wing part with the missing Boeing.
