Bangkok (dpa) – A new piece of possible plane debris found in Mozambique will be sent to Australia for examination as part of the ongoing search for missing Malaysia Airlines MH370, Australian officials said Saturday.
The light grey piece about 1 metre long and stamped with the serial number 676EB was found in December by a South African teenager while he was on holiday in Mozambique.
His family said they alerted the authorities only after reading earlier this month that another piece of possible debris had been found in Mozambique. That find was described as being “consistent” with computer models of where the Boeing 777 may have crashed.
The aircraft is thought to have come down in the southern Indian Ocean. In August, international experts determined that a wing part found on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean belonged to the disappeared aircraft.
A spokesman for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said that they had seen images of the latest find, and that South African, Australian, and Malaysian authorities “were coordinating for the piece to be sent to the ATSB laboratory in Canberra.”
There would be no comment on whether it may or may not come from MH370 until the piece had been examined, spokesman Dan O’Malley said.
The Beijing-bound flight, with 239 people aboard, disappeared about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8, 2014.
A high-tech search of the Indian Ocean seabed has neither found the main body of the aircraft, nor established definitively where the plane crashed.
