Official: Debris found not part of Flight 370

Show Caption Hide Caption New debris on Indian Ocean island not plane part Police on the French island of Reunion found more debris on the shoreline Sunday just days after discovering a wing flap suspected to be from the missing MH 370 flight. (Aug. 2)

An object found on an Indian Ocean island is not part of a plane door but a generic ladder that has nothing to do with missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Malaysian official said Sunday.

The debris was found on the island of Reunion, where a piece of a Boeing 777 wing flap was found on a beach in the town of Saint Andre on Wednesday.

“I read all over media it (the new debris) was part of a door," Malaysian Director General of Civil Aviation Azharuddin Abdul Rahman told AFP and other media outlets. "But I checked with the Civil Aviation Authority, and people on the ground in Reunion, and it was just a domestic ladder.”

Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, bound for Beijing with 239 people aboard. Most of the victims were Chinese.

Reunion is a French territory of more than 800,000 people almost 600 miles east of Madagascar. The island is about 3,500 miles southwest of Maylaysia and more than 2,000 miles from the vast area of the Indian Ocean where Flight 370 is suspected to have crashed.

The wing flap, suspected to be from Flight 370, arrived at a testing facility in France on Saturday. The "flaperon" was escorted to the DGA TA aeronautical testing site near Toulouse, southern France, by police motorcycles and a police car.



Experts in Toulouse will begin work to determine whether the part came from the missing Boeing 777 on Wednesday, the Paris prosecutor's office said. An investigating judge is due to meet with Malaysian authorities and French aviation investigative agency representatives Monday.

Malaysia’s Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai, citing French authorities and Boeing, confirmed Sunday that the flaperon had been verified as being from a Boeing 777, the same type of aircraft as Flight 370. Representatives from the U.S., France, China and Boeing were working to establish whether the flaperon came from the flight, he said.

Malaysian officials said they would seek help from territories near Reunion to try to find more plane debris and to allow access to crash experts, the Associated Press reported.

“I urge all parties to allow this crucial investigation process to take its course. I reiterate this is for the sake of the next of kin of the loved ones of MH370 who would be anxiously awaiting news and have suffered much over this time,” Liow said.

Aviation security expert Christophe Naudin explained to France's BFM-TV that only two other 777s have crashed since 2013 — one crash-landed on a San Francisco runway and one exploded over Ukraine.

"In the aeronautic community there is no doubt on the issue of what the debris belongs to," Naudin said. "We are all convinced that it belongs to this flight (370)."