A Malaysia Airlines plane is seen on the tarmac at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 12, 2014.
Photo: Getty Images
South Africa and Mozambique gave approval this week for
Malaysia to check their waters for debris possibly linked to missing
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, also known as MH370. But transport
minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai told reporters that investigators
weren't immediately sending over a team, according to Bernama.
"Both countries will assist us to find [the plane], and they will inform us if more debris have been found," he said.
Multiple pieces of would-be wreckage have turned up in the
African countries in recent months. Authorities with the Australian
Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the hunt for the missing
plane, confirmed Tuesday that two items found in Mozambique -- a segment
from a flap track fairing and a part of a horizontal stabilizer panel
-- were "almost certainly" from MH370.
A third item, discovered last month in South Africa and potentially
belonging to the missing Boeing 777's engine, was still undergoing
analysis.
Liow acknowledged the "rather high probability" that the
evidence was from MH370 but mentioned how difficult it would be to
definitively confirm it. "This is not like [a] flaperon, which can be
immediately verified upon because [a] flaperon has serial numbers," he
said, referencing the only piece of confirmed debris in the case so far.
"The debris that were found did not have serial numbers."
Also this week, Malaysian officials confirmed they would
meet with representatives from China and Australia in June to decide the
future of the search for MH370, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported.
More than 100,000 square kilometers of the 120,000-square-kilometer underwater search area have been scanned, according to a recent operational update from the Australian bureau. Without
new, credible information "that leads to the identification of a
specific location of the aircraft, Governments have agreed that there
will be no further expansion of the search area," the update read.
MH370 is thought to have crashed in the Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.
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