The debris found last week along the shore of Reunion Island has been deemed most assuredly remnants from the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 that went missing over a year ago, according to Yahoo! Some relatives said the mixed messages were causing them yet more confusion and anxiety.
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French official Serge Mackowiak, who is assisting in the investigation of the debris, says there is strong enough evidence to link the debris to the missing flight.
Najib delivered the news on national television in Malaysia.
In the Chinese capital, Xu Jinghong said she could not understand why Malaysian and French authorities did not make their announcement together. “We still want them back”, she said.
“Why the hell do you have one confirm and one not?”
A spokeswoman for Malaysia Airlines told Daily Mail Australia the company’s first priority was to call the victims’ families before the confirmation was made by French authorities, who examined the wing, and the Malaysian prime minister. “I would like to assure all those affected by this tragedy that the government of Malaysia is committed to doing everything within our means to find out the truth of what happened”. But, despite the efforts of 26 nations and the largest search in aviation history, from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, the plane could not be located.
However, endless months of searching had failed to turn up any evidence of the missing aircraft until the two-metre-long portion of a Boeing 777 wing, known as a flaperon, was found washed ashore on Reunion Island last week, some 4-thousand kilometers where the search for the missing plane has been focused.
“The fact that this wreckage does now very much look like it is from MH370 does seem to confirm that it went down in the Indian Ocean, it does seem very consistent with the search pattern that we’ve been using for the last few months”, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.
The debris was discovered on Reunion Island on July 29 and was officially identified as part of a plane wing known as a flaperon from a Boeing 777.
The Malaysia Airlines jet disappeared on March 8th last year, veering off course en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, sparking a colossal multinational hunt for the aircraft.
‘We expect and hope that there would be more objects to be found which would be able to help resolve this mystery.’. “Now we know roughly where it might have crashed”, he said. “Or if it’s got only tropical barnacles, that might tell them it went down further north”, said Shane Ahyong, a crustacean specialist from the Australian Museum.
Satellite and other data point to it coming down in the southern Indian Ocean and ships have been scouring more than 50,000 square kilometres (19,000 square miles) of deep ocean floor for evidence.
Malaysian officials have said the plane’s movements were consistent with deliberate actions by someone on the plane, suggesting someone in the cockpit intentionally flew the aircraft off course.
In defining the search area, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau also operated on the theory that the crew was unresponsive, possibly suffering from oxygen deprivation, as the plane flew on autopilot.
Some analysts argue that the apparent lack of damage to the piece of wreckage indicates a controlled landing on the ocean, with the jet sinking largely intact.
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The Boeing 777 was minutes into its scheduled flight when it disappeared from civil radar.
