Mozambique debris ‘almost certainly’ from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

SYDNEY // Two pieces of debris that were recently discovered along the coast of Mozambique were highly likely to have come from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Australian and Malaysian officials said yesterday.

An analysis of the parts by an international investigation team showed that both pieces were consistent with panels from a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft.

“The analysis has concluded the debris is almost certainly from MH370,” said the Australian transport minister, Darren Chester. The dimensions, materials and construction of both parts conformed to the plane’s model and the paint and stencilling on parts also matched those used by Malaysia Airlines.

The discovery of the two pieces provided another piece of the puzzle into the plane’s fate and bolstered authorities’ assertion that the aircraft went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

But whether the debris would provide any clues into exactly what happened to the aircraft, and why, remained uncertain.

“Close examination of the debris might possibly give some additional information relative to the search, but it is unlikely,” said Dan O’Malley, spokesman for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which was leading the hunt for the plane off Australia’s west coast. Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, 2014 with 239 people on board and was believed to have crashed somewhere in a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean, about 6,000 kilometres east of Mozambique.

Until now, the only other confirmed piece of debris from the Boeing 777 was a portion of wing that washed ashore on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion last year.

The flight vanished in 2014 with 239 people on board