Malaysia: New debris "almost certainly" from Flight 370
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- Malaysia's government said Thursday that two more pieces of debris, discovered in South Africa and Rodrigues Island off Mauritius, were "almost certainly" from Flight 370, which mysteriously disappeared more than two years ago with 239 people on board.
The announcement means a total of five pieces of debris from the Malaysia Airlines' jet have now been discovered in various spots around the Indian Ocean since it vanished on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said the two new pieces were an engine cowling piece with a partial Rolls-Royce logo and an interior panel piece from an aircraft cabin. This was the first interior part found from the missing plane.
An international team of experts in Australia who examined the debris concluded that both pieces were consistent with panels found on a Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777 aircraft, Liow said.
"As such, the team has confirmed that both pieces of debris from South Africa and Rodrigues Island are almost certainly from MH370," he said in a statement.
In March, investigators confirmed two pieces of debris found along Mozambique's coast were almost certainly from the aircraft. Last year, a wing part from the plane washed ashore on France's Reunion Island.
Flight 370 is believed to have crashed somewhere in a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean about 1,100 miles off Australia's west coast. An ongoing search has found nothing so far. Authorities had predicted that any debris from the plane that isn't on the ocean floor would eventually be carried by currents to the east coast of Africa.