Search for MH370 fragments in Reunion ends on Monday

SAINTE-MARIE (France): Active air and sea searches for fragments of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 off Reunion island will stop on Monday after just over a week, the local authorities said.

AFP reported local official Do­­mi­nique Sorain as saying that if no objects were found by Monday, “we will move to a phase of heighten­ed surveillance”.

“No object has been found in the sea that could belong to an airplane. However, a certain amount of debris had been found on land,” he said yesterday.

This has been handed over to investigators but there is nothing the size of the Boeing 777 wing part found on Reunion last month that Malaysian authorities had said came from MH370.

The searches, which began on Aug 8, have covered nearly 10,000 sq km of ocean, said Sorain, adding that police had spent 200 hours searching for the debris.

The tiny Indian Ocean island of Reunion has been in the global media spotlight since the large wing part called a flaperon was disco­vered on its shores last month.

On Aug 5, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said experts had “conclusively confirmed” that the debris came from the flight, which disappeared on March 8 last year from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Meanwhile, in KUALA LUMPUR, Transport Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said the Malaysian investigative team had verified that debris found in Maldives was not from Flight MH370.

“They are not even plane mate­rial,” he told reporters after a seminar on Malaysian Chinese cultural development at Wisma MCA yesterday.

Last week, Liow revealed that Maldives, Madagascar and Mauri­tius, nations surrounding the French Reunion Island where the MH370 flaperon was found, had been requested to assist in the search for more debris.

A day later on Aug 10, Liow was notified by Maldives authorities of the discovery of debris believed to be from an airplane.

A team of Malaysian investigators, led by Department of Civil Aviation director-general Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, was sent there to verify the debris.