More debris found on Indian Ocean island
More metallic fragments have been discovered by inspectors probing the disappearance of Malaysian airlines Flight MH370 on an Indian Ocean island, raising hopes for new clues.
The Sunday development came as Malaysian officials called on authorities in the regions surrounding the French controlled La Reunion Island to remain on alert for more debris washing up on their coastlines.
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai announced on Sunday that the country's civil aviation authorities were contacting their counterparts in other Indian Ocean territories to look for more pieces of wreckage.
"This is to allow the experts to conduct more substantive analysis should there be more debris coming onto land, providing us more clues to the missing aircraft," he said.
He further confirmed in a separate statement that the aircraft wing part discovered last Wednesday on the French island had been "officially identified" as belonging to a Boeing 777 -- making it nearly certain that it was from the still missing Flight MH370, which is the only Boeing 777 plane to have ever been lost at sea.
However, a spokesman for Australia's Transport and Infrastructure Minister Warren Truss stated that more "objects are being brought to local stations but nothing 'obvious' so far. And no door."
The ambiguity of what actually happened to the doomed aircraft and where exactly it went down are still likely to persist unless the plane’s black box is found.
Meanwhile, Director General of Malaysia’s Civil Aviation Azharuddin Abdul Rahman was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that an object found at a beach near the town of Saint-Denis in Reunion on Sunday had nothing to do with the probe of the missing Flight 370.
Rahman said, "I'm the one leading the investigation in France for the analysis of the (wing flap) piece brought back. I read all over media it (the new debris) was part of a door. But I checked with the Civil Aviation Authority, and people on the ground in Reunion, and it was just a domestic ladder."
An exhausting 16-month search had yielded no evidence on what exactly happened to the flight that vanished on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
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