Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

New Debris 'Almost Certainly' From Missing Malaysian Flight MH370

This piece of what is believed to be aircraft wreckage was found early this month off the coast of Mozambique.
Adrien Barbier
/
AFP/Getty Images
This piece of what is believed to be aircraft wreckage was found early this month off the coast of Mozambique.

Australian investigators say two pieces of debris found on the coast of Mozambique are "almost certainly" from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared in March 2014.

Australia's minister of transport, Darren Chester, said the two objects found in the southern African nation had been analyzed by an international team of investigators and were found to be consistent with panels from the Boeing 777 aircraft.

"The analysis has concluded the debris is almost certainly from MH370," Chester said, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

There were 239 people on board Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. However, the flight vanished from radar screens long before it reached the Chinese capital, and despite one of the largest and most expensive searches ever conducted, its fate remains a mystery

Last year, a part of the aircraft's wing was found washed up on a beach on the French island of Reunion, thousands of miles from the search site in the Indian Ocean. Oceanographers said it could have been carried there on ocean currents.

The Malaysian government says it wants to send a team to help search for wreckage along the coast of southern Africa and Mozambique, although Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said he could see no need to change where searchers are looking for the wreckage of the aircraft.

South African TV reports that another piece of debris has been found on that country's southern coast. It appears to be part of an engine cowling with a Rolls-Royce logo on it, and will be examined to see if it, too, came from MH370.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Kevin Beesley