Confirmation that plane debris washed up on a remote Indian Ocean island is from missing Malaysian airlines MH370 appears imminent.

A team from aircraft maker Boeing has been dispatched to France to confirm that barnacle-encrusted debris is from the plane that disappeared in March last year with 239 people on board.

Sources close to Boeing have been quoted in the United States as saying the company believes the two-metre long wing part known as a flaperon is from MH370, but company experts would confirm it when they arrived at the offices of France's crash investigation agency laboratory in Toulouse over the weekend.

Details for a liquid soap container label, marked Jakarta - Indonesia, that was washed onto the beach at Saint-Andre.

The debris washed up on the French island of Reunion, east of Madagascar, last Wednesday.

Malaysia Airlines told the Malaysian government on Friday the wreckage is definitely from a Boeing 777, citing an identification number.

"This could be the convincing evidence that MH370 went down in the Indian Ocean," said Malaysia's deputy transport minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi.

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Malaysia has also sent officials to France to inspect the debris, saying the crucial identification will come through checking serial numbers on the wing part.

French gendarmes and police inspect a large piece of plane debris.

Malaysia said it remained responsible for the overall investigation into the disappearance of the plane while en-route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing while other agencies from France, the United States and Australia would also contribute.

"There should be a metal plate attached to the flaperon close to where the number 657BB was printed," said Mohamed Suffian from Malaysian Institute of Aviation Technology Research Innovation, referring to a number photographed on the wreckage.

"On the plate there should be the part's manufacturing date and batch number," he said, adding that Boeing would have recorded the batch number when the flaperon was attached to the plane.

French gendarmes work on a oversized crate, believed to contain plane wreckage, in the cargo area of the airport in Saint-Denis.

The Toulouse laboratory, which employed 600 staff, would conduct tests to try to establish how the wing-flap came to be separated from the rest of the plane.

The same laboratory analysed pieces of debris from Air France flight AF447 that crashed between Rio de Janerio and Paris in 2009.

In January, Malaysia Airlines declared the plane's disappearance an accident, clearing the way for it to pay compensation to victims' relatives while a search for the plane continued in a vast area of the Indian Ocean.

The large object that washed up Wednesday on the shore of Reunion came from a Boeing 777.



But an interim report of the investigation released in March deepened the mystery, raising serious doubts over whether the pilots or any of the crew hijacked the plane.

The possibility that one the pilots or crew diverted the plane thousands of kilometres off course before crashing the Indian Ocean had been one of the most plausible theories surrounding the disappearance.

The report said there were "no behavioural signs of social isolation, change in interests or habits, self-neglect, frug or alcohol abuse of the captain, first officer and the cabin crew."

Lawyers said confirmation the debris is from MH370 could be expected to trigger a wave of new lawsuits against Malaysia Airlines.

- with agencies