Police have been handed a piece of debris which could be part of a plane door, according to the man who discovered it on the small Indian Ocean island now at the heart of the search for MH370.
The man found the as yet unidentified object, measuring 27 inches to the authorities on Reunion island on Sunday morning - days after a wing flap belonging to a Boeing 777 was found on its shoreline.
According to AFP, the man believed it to be part of the door - although police originally dismissed the claim.
Meanwhile, officers in a different area of the island collected another piece of debris, measuring about 15 square inches.
Police placed the debris - which has a sort of handle partially covered by leather and is inscribed with two ideograms - in an iron case.
The discoveries are likely to fuel speculation that these parts belong to doomed Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.
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A piece of metallic debris found on a beach in Saint-Denis found on the French Reunion island
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Police officers inspecting the pieces of debris which have been found on the Indian Ocean island's shore
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The discovery came amid rumours of a plane door washing up - but this was laughed off by police
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Officers have now confirmed they are analysing the piece of metal on the island. The wing flap is now in France
The wing flap discovered on Wednesday is due to undergo tests later this week to find out whether or not it belonged to the plane.
Today, Malaysian transport minister Liow Tiong Lai said today that French authorities, aircraft manufacturer Boeing, U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Malaysian team had all confirmed the part was from a Boeing 777. MH370 is the only missing 777 in the world.
But these piece of metal are not the only parts to be found on Reunion: a suitcase has also been discovered in the last few days, while locals have admitted parts have been washing up for months.
Two residents have said they spotted suitcases and a 'plane seat' in May, but did not think anything of their discoveries.
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Nicolas Ferrier, who said his job is to 'collect rubbish and burn it', told The Sunday Telegraph he spotted a blue seat and 'a couple of suitcases' on the beach in early May.
'I burnt them,' he told the newspaper. He also claims to have seen the wing flap on the shore.
His story was echoed by another woman who told local news website Zinfos974.com that her son saw 'the wing of a plane' while they were walking along the shore.
It seems the residents of the small island, which has a population of less than 850,000 people, have been largely unaware of the mystery surrounding the plane's disappearance.
The flight took off from Kuala Lumpar on March 8 last year, bound for Beijing with 239 people on board.
But it never arrived, disappearing without a trace less than an hour after take off - sparking an international search which has covered vast swathes of ocean as investigators desperately try to find out what happened to the plane.
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Malaysian authorities have confirmed that this plane wreckage washed up on an Indian Ocean island was from a Boeing 777, meaning the part is almost certainly from missing flight MH370
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Police officers escort a white vehicle transporting what is believed to be debris from a Boeing 777 plane which is likely to be from MH370. The cargo was delivered to a defence ministry laboratory in Balma, near Toulouse earlier today
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The van enters the defence ministry unit, where experts will begin their analysis to decide whether it is indeed from MH370
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Members of the French gendarmerie seal a wooden box containing the wing part that was washed up on a beach on La Reunion island before putting it into a van ready to be placed onto a flight to France
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Television crews at work on Bois-Rouge beach on La Reunion where the debris from the as yet unidentified aircraft washed ashore
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People walk on the beach where the piece of wreckage appeared on Wednesday on the north coast of La Reunion
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The two-metre-long section of wreckage was discovered on the island of La Reunion, east of Madagascar, more than 3,800 miles away from where the aircraft was last seen, north of Kuala Lumpur and some 3,000 miles from the search area west of Australia
The appearance of the wing flap, which Malaysian authorities have now confirmed is from a Boeing 777, is the biggest breakthrough in the mystery thus far.
But it could still be a number of days before it is confirmed whether or not it belonged to MH370.
Although it has now arrived at a specialist laboratory in Toulouse, the eight-foot part will only begin undergoing testing on Wednesday.
On Monday, an investigating judge will meet Malaysian authorities and representatives of the French aviation investigative agency, known as the BEA, according to a statement.
Speaking on Saturday, Liow Tiong Lai said he wasn't willing to 'speculate' on the outcome of the investigation, but added: 'If the flaperon does belongs to MH370 it is actually in accordance with the drift pattern seen in the Southern Indian Ocean.'
However, his colleagues have been more positive about the possibility of finally solving the mystery of the MH370, which disappeared on March 8 last year.
Malaysian deputy transport minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi said: 'I believe that we are moving closer to solving the mystery of MH370. This could be the convincing evidence that MH370 went down in the Indian Ocean.'
Experts said barnacles found on the wreckage could help pinpoint MH370's black boxes if indeed it has come from the doomed jet.
Suspected MH370 wreckage arrives in France for analysis
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The section of wreckage was carefully loaded onto a jet in La Reunion before it was transported to France
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French experts will attempt to match the debris, which was from a Boeing 777, to the doomed passenger jet
Robin Beaman, a marine geologist at Australia's James Cook University, said it would be worth studying the crustaceans to gauge their age, which might indicate how long the fragment had been adrift and whether they are unique to a certain part of the ocean.
Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at Imperial College London, added: 'There's different barnacles in different parts of the ocean, so you might expect some CSI scenario where just by looking at the barnacles, you can pinpoint where it came from.'
Oceanographer Arnold Gordon, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said the number of barnacles on the part are consistent with other debris he's seen which has been in the ocean for more than a year.
'It's been 16 months from the crash and everything fits together,' he said. 'So I think the probability that it's from 370 is pretty high.'
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Investigators prepared to load a sea-encrusted wing fragment onto a plane bound for France to undergo further investigations to learn whether the aircraft remnant could help unlock the mystery of MH370
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A white van carrying a wooden box containing the wing part that was washed up on a beach waits near a cargo hangar ready for it to be put onto a flight to France at the Roland Garros Airport in Sainte-Marie
Wing flap consistent with lost Malaysian Boeing 777
Gordon said the discovery will give confidence to the ocean floor searchers that they are looking in the right area.
The Malaysia Airlines flight was one of only three Boeing 777s to have been involved in major incidents, along with the downing of MH17 over Ukraine last year and the Asiana Airlines crash at San Francisco airport in 2013 that left three dead.
The wing component found on the French island of La Reunion bears the part number '657-BB', according to photos of the debris, which matches the part for a wing flap in Boeing manufacturer's manual.
'From the part number, it is confirmed that it is from a Boeing 777 aircraft. This information is from MAS (Malaysia Airlines). They have informed me,' the minister told AFP.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the MH370 search, said greater clarity on the origin of the part should be confirmed 'within the next 24 hours'.
'We are increasingly confident that this debris is from MH370,' Dolan told AFP.
An Australian-led search has spent 16 months combing the southern Indian Ocean for the aircraft, but no confirmed physical evidence has ever been found, sparking wild conspiracy theories about the plane's fate.
The fruitless search in January led Malaysian authorities to declare all on board were presumed dead.
Speculation on the cause of the plane's disappearance has focused primarily on a possible mechanical or structural failure, a hijacking or terror plot, or rogue pilot action.
The discovery of the piece of plane debris by a cleaning team on Wednesday sparked fevered speculation which was heightened with the discovery on the same rocky beach of a piece of torn luggage, a detergent bottle with Indonesian markings and a Chinese bottle of mineral water.
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Experts claim barnacles found on the wreckage could help pinpoint MH370's black boxes if indeed it has come from the doomed jet because some species are unique to particular areas of the ocean
Local workers find items of debris along Saint Andre beach
Australian officials played down the discovery of the luggage saying it 'may just be rubbish'.
Scientists say there are several plausible scenarios in which ocean currents could have carried a piece of debris from the plane to the island.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said while the part 'could be a very important piece of evidence' if it was linked to MH370, using reverse modelling to determine more precisely where the debris may have drifted from was 'almost impossible'.
'After 16 months, the vagaries of the currents, reverse modelling is almost impossible,' Truss said.
Australian search authorities, which are leading the hunt for the Boeing 777 aircraft in the Indian Ocean some 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) from La Reunion, said they were confident the main debris field was in the current search area.
Dolan said the discovery of the debris, which experts said could be a flaperon from a Boeing 777 aircraft, did not mean other parts would start washing up on La Reunion or at nearby locations.
'Over the last 16 or 17 months, any floating debris would have dispersed quite markedly across the Indian Ocean,' he said.
Truss said accident investigators would be keen to examine the part to try to find out how it may have separated from the rest of the jet and 'whether there's any evidence of fire or other misadventure on the aircraft.'
But Dolan cautioned it would be difficult to determine why the plane disappeared just from the debris.
'There's limits to how much you can determine from just one piece of debris and we don't think it would give us sufficient reliability to speculate too much about the rest of the debris,' he added.
'We know that the main debris field associated with MH370 is going to be on the bottom of the ocean, not floating on the surface.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3182784/Now-plane-door-Reunion-Island-debris-suspected-MH370-tested-France.html#ixzz3hezONbde
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