Malaysian officials have said the latest piece of 'debris' found on the tiny Indian Ocean island where a Boeing 777 wing flap was washed up is nothing more than part of an ordinary ladder.

Police had taken the unusual piece of metal from a Reunion beach this morning, thinking it may have been part of a door from the missing Malaysian Airways plane.

A wing flap, thought to belong to the aircraft, was found on the island's shore on Wednesday, and has been flown to France for analysis.

Malaysian director general of civil aviation Azharuddin Abdul Rahman - who is leading the investigation in France - has dismissed all speculation over today's finds.

'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,' he said.

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A piece of metallic debris found on a beach in Saint-Denis found on the French Reunion island. It has transpired to be piece of a ladder, and not part of the plane as originally thought

Police officers inspecting the pieces of debris which have been found on the Indian Ocean island's shore

The discovery came amid rumours of a plane door washing up - but this was laughed off by police

Officers have now confirmed they are analysing the piece of metal on the island. The wing flap is now in France

However, all the authorities who have inspected the wing flap - including the French, aircraft manufacturer Boeing and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) - have confirmed the part was from a Boeing 777.

MH370 is the only missing 777 in the world.

It has also emerged a number of other items from the plane could have washed up on Reunion.

Two residents have said they spotted suitcases and a 'plane seat' in May, but did not think anything of their discoveries.

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 Lumpur 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.

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

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

The van enters the defence ministry unit, where experts will begin their analysis to decide whether it is indeed from MH370

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

Television crews at work on Bois-Rouge beach on La Reunion where the debris from the as yet unidentified aircraft washed ashore

People walk on the beach where the piece of wreckage appeared on Wednesday on the north coast of La Reunion

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.

The section of wreckage was carefully loaded onto a jet in La Reunion before it was transported to France

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.'

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

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

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.

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

REUNION: THE EXPLOSIVE ISLAND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE INDIAN OCEAN As the world's eyes turned towards Reunion's coastline, its heart, quite literally, exploded. The Piton de la Fournaise volcano - French for Peak of the Furnace - was shooting out plumes of lava on Friday. But it is nothing unusual: its the third eruption this year, with more than 150 recorded since the 1600s. The volcano, more than 530,000 years old, ranks with other active volcanoes in Hawaii, Italy and Antarctica. The Piton de la Fournaise volcano - in the middle of the island - spews molten lava on Saturday It is its third eruption this year, and it is shooting out lava fountains up to 20 metres high 'This is a long eruptive fissure because at the surface it is about 1 kilometres (0.62 miles) long,' said Aline Peltier, a scientist at the Piton de la Fournaise Volcano Observatory. 'After 24 hours we still have five eruption sites. Usually after a day we only have one. So this is very interesting.' The lava fountains are shooting as high as 40 metres (44 yards) and are creating cones that are about 20 metres high after only one day of eruption, said Peltier. The volcano is not seen as dangerous because the lava flows down the east side of the mountain through an uninhabited area called the Grand Brule, or the Big Burned, toward the sea. The last times the volcano threatened the population was in 1977 and 1986. Far from being frightened, hundreds of people drove up the mountain to get a better look at the volcano's fireworks. Tourists and Reunion residents watched from vantage points, while volcanologists hiked closer to the eruption. Advertisement

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.