Debris found on Reunion Island
Johnny Begue, the gardener who stumbled across the Boeing 777 debris on the beach, has been chatting to reporters who have just arrived on Reunion Island.
He said he toyed with the idea of using the debris as a decoration, but decided against it out of respect for the victims' families.
"I was working and around 9 o'clock I went to see if I could find a stone to crush some chilies. That was when I found the debris and realized from the roundness of it that it was from a plane. There were screws and everything, I came down to look at it and called my friends who helped me. To begin with we thought about taking it to use as a decoration, but then we thought about the families...we thought if this was a crash then there will be families of the people who died and we should respect them."
New details emerging that could explain why the flaperon came ashore on Reunion Island while the rest of the plane remains unaccounted for.
Flaperons are made from a "highly buoyant material" and are filled with air pockets, meaning they can float almost indefinitely, according to experts. Whereas other pieces of the wreckage may have sunk irretrievably into the depths of the ocean, the flaperon - swept along by powerful currents in the Indian Ocean - continued to float until it emerged on the island.
Australia could be stuck with a sizeable bill for the MH370 search as China is refusing to contribute funding, Cate Gower writes.
A spokesman for The Office of Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss told news.com.au that China has been asked to pay for a third of the costs, the other two thirds being paid by Australia and Malaysia.
This spokesperson added that "China has not contributed resources or equipment to the underwater search", though it did send ships in the early days of the investigation.
It seems that the people of Reunion are no strangers to danger and intrigue.
Not only does the island play host to a huge volcano that erupted this morning, it has also seen 18 shark attacks in the last four years, of which seven were fatal.
Only last week one man had a "good chunk" of his arm ripped off by a shark according to local media reports.
"Our newspapers only ever write about car crashes, volcano eruptions and shark attacks," restaurant manager Guillaune Lalot told the Guardian, adding: "Maybe this discovery will draw a different type of attention to the island."
Confirmation that MH370 crashed into the Indian Ocean is unlikely to satsify the conspiracy theorists, the Telegraph's Laurence Dodds writes.
"The lack of evidence opened up a gap which people rushed to fill with their hopes, fears, and obsessions. Not just the families of the victims, but also conspiracy theorists, both amateur and professional, who had a wild range of ideas about what really happened. If the debris is confirmed as part of MH370 many of those people will give up; the mystery is over, the possibilities are closed down, and the plane is back on Earth. But not all of them will. In fact, I think a pretty big proportion of them will refuse to accept it."
It will take "at least another day" to conclude whether MH370 crashed into the sea, according to investigators.
This may seem like an unusual prediction considering barnacles were discovered on the debris, but the investigation is expected to be a time-consuming process as it involves experts from three different countries spread across several continents.
The debris is expected to arrive in Paris tomorrow morning and then be transported to Toulouse for further tests.
"The most important part of this whole exercise at the moment is to give some kind of closure to the families," Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss said earlier today.
MH370 is one of three fatal crashes experienced by a Boeing 777 and is the only one that remains unaccounted for since the model entered commercial services in 1995, Cate Gower reports.
In addition to this it is the only Boeing 777 to have crashed south of the equator, suggesting that the plane debris found on Reunion Island is from the missing plane.
As MH370 is the only Boeing 777 believed to have gone missing in the Indian Ocean, there is very little doubt that this mystery is on the brink of being solved.
Hopes are now rising that, finally, the debris found on the beach in Reunion can be officially confirmed as MH370's flaperon.
The plane debris on Reunion Island is "convincing evidence" that MH370 went down in the Indian Ocean, Malaysia's deputy transport minister has said.
"I believe that we are moving close to solving the mystery of MH370. This could be the convincing evidence that MH370 went down in the Indian Ocean," Abdul Aziz Kaprawi told AFP.
A Malaysian offical has told AFP they are moving closer to "solving the mystery" of MH370, a bold claim prompting speculation of new key details emerging about what happened to the plane.
The scenes at Reunion Island are now being compared to a Hollywood movie scenario - as investigators scramble to recover bits of plane debris from a beach in the north, a volcano erupts to the south, reportedly risking disruption to air searches.
A Malaysian official has said the number found on the plane debris confirms it is from a Boeing 777 aircraft, AFP reports.
An Australian sailing fan who lost his boat in 2013 - only for it to wash up on a Madagascar island nine months later - has weighed in on the affair.
Stephen Knight believes that his boat "Leisurecat" may have been swept across the Indian Ocean by similar currents believed to have moved MH370 debris to Reunion Island.
"The wing is obviously a lot lighter in structure than what my boat would have been. The fact that the wing has taken longer and travelled less far in distance - it all adds up," he told Reuters.
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