Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced early Thursday that a plane wing section found on the French island of Reunion was “conclusively confirmed” to be from Flight 370, saying he hoped the news would end “unspeakable” uncertainty.
Advertisement
“I can only ascertain that it’s plane debris“, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said Thursday.
A portion of a Boeing 777 wing was found on the beach of Reunion Island last week, but officials were slow to announce that it was from the missing Flight MH370.
Now investigators will reportedly turn their focus to the area around Reunion Island to determine if the remainder of the flight is buried somewhere beneath the Indian Ocean. Whether and why that would have happened has been the source of considerable conjecture since Flight 370 vanished, but an exhaustive year-long search of the ocean floor found no evidence of the plane.
“After 17 months, we need definite answers”, Weeks said.
After the Malaysian PM officially confirmed the wing was from MH370, relatives were informed of the findings by Malaysian Airlines.
They did, however, confirm that the part was from a Boeing 777.
The Independent Group, or IG, a respected global coalition of aviation experts and scientist, said the torn debris implies the plane broke up mid-air.
But at a news conference in Paris, Deputy Prosecutor Serge Mackowiak said only that “the very strong conjectures are to be confirmed by complementary analysis that will begin tomorrow morning”.
The Malaysian authorities believe it is from the missing aeroplane, but French experts examining the finds have stopped short of confirming the link. The reason for the apparent disagreement between the worldwide officials was not clear Wednesday.
“The experts are carrying out their work promptly in order to provide complete and reliable information as soon as possible to the victims’ families”, Mackowiak said.
The caution was typical of how France carries out air crash investigations. There would also be foot patrols and search operations by helicopters and maritime units, it added.
“So much of our grieving process involves physicality, such as seeing the body, and that’s not present here, which makes it very hard for the families to gain closure”, she said. An Australian government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to comment publicly, said Malaysia wasn’t supposed to make the announcement, and had gone out on its own making a conclusive statement before getting the evidence to back it up.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Thursday that the Reunion Island discovery “suggests that for the first time we might be a little bit closer to solving this baffling mystery”.
Mary Schiavo, a CNN aviation analyst, said the families appeared to be stuck in the middle of a “tug of war among nations”.
Advertisement
The resulting theories range from the wild – alien abduction, the plane was shot down by the U.S. military near the island of Diego Garcia, it was transported to Russian Federation or Pakistan for use in terrorism – to sober, science-based arguments that the plane is in the southern Indian Ocean, but not necessarily where searchers are looking. “We expect and hope that there would be more objects to be found which would be able to help resolve this mystery”.
