French confirm wing part was from doomed plane

The section of a wing that washed up on an island in the Indian Ocean in July was part of a Malaysian airliner that vanished 18 months ago, French authorities confirmed Thursday.

The wing section, or flaperon, was found on a beach on Reunion Island, setting off a massive search on land and in nearby waters for more debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Nothing else was found and the search was called off last month.

Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, bound for Beijing with 239 people aboard. Most of the victims were Chinese.

Reunion is a French territory with more than 800,000 people almost 600 miles east of Madagascar. The island is about 3,500 miles southwest of Malaysia and more than 2,000 miles from the vast area of ocean where Flight 370 is suspected to have crashed.

French prosecutors said in a statement they believe "with certitude" that the flaperon is part of the Boeing 777.

A technician from Airbus Defense and Space in Spain, which had made the part for Boeing, identified a serial number on the flaperon as being from the airliner, prosecutors said in a statement.

“It is therefore possible to confirm with certainty that the flaperon found on Reunion island on July 29, 2015, corresponds to the one from flight MH370,” the statement said.