Two pieces of debris found in Mozambique have arrived in Australia for experts to determine if they came from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, an official said.
An extensive search for the Boeing 777, thought to have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, has so far failed to find any wreckage, although a piece of wing washed up on a distant island last year.
Two pieces of debris found in Mozambique — a flat grey fragment, with the words “No Step” printed along one side, found on a sandbank and 1m-long piece of metal picked up in December last year by a South African holidaymaker — have since come to light.
“Both pieces of debris were packaged in Africa and remained that way until arrival,” an Australian Transport Safety Bureau spokesman said yesterday.
“They are being opened [yesterday], with investigators from a range of countries and organizations in attendance. Procedures appropriate to maintain the integrity of this potential evidence have been followed,” the official added.
Flight MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 passengers and crew on board, mostly Chinese and Malaysians.
A wing fragment confirmed to be from Flight MH370 was found last year on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, the first proof that the plane indeed went down.
The bureau last week said that a second piece of debris found in Reunion was “unlikely to be from an aircraft.”
The bureau said it did not anticipate any statements on the Mozambique debris until the examination process was complete.
The search for Flight MH370 is expected to wrap up in June or July if the aircraft is not found in the target zone of 120,000 square kilometers.
No crash site has been located, but Australian authorities said ahead of the two-year anniversary of the plane’s disappearance that they are still hopeful it would be found.
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