MH370 wreckage found?

Investigators yesterday scrambled to study plane wreckage that washed up on a tiny Indian Ocean island, fuelling hopes that one of aviation's greatest enigmas could finally be solved: the mystery of missing flight MH370.

The two-metre (six-foot) long piece of wreckage was found on the French island of La Reunion, offering up bittersweet hope of closure to the families of 239 people who disappeared in March last year on the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said the debris, believed to be a part of a wing, was "very likely to be from a Boeing 777 but we need to verify whether it is from flight MH370."

But as local French air transport police studied the debris and experts from Malaysia headed to the scene, authorities warned against jumping to conclusions.

"Whatever wreckage is found needs to be further verified before we can further confirm whether it belongs to MH370," Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told reporters in New York, saying he hoped for answers "as soon as possible".

Flight MH370 was travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it mysteriously turned off its route and vanished on March 8 last year.

Local government officials on La Reunion said France's civil aviation investigating authority BEA has been asked to coordinate an international probe into the origin of the debris.

"No theory is being ruled out, including that it comes from a Boeing 777," La Reunion officials said.

Najib said authorities would ship the object to the southern French city of Toulouse to be examined by the BEA.

Further adding to the mystery, what appeared to be a piece of luggage was discovered in the same place as the plane wreckage.

Australia, which has led a fruitless 16-month search for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, said the discovery was an "important development".

Authorities involved in the search at sea, guided by the analysis of signals from the plane that were detected by a satellite, believe it eventually went down in the southern Indian Ocean.

But no confirmed physical evidence has ever been found and Malaysian authorities in January declared that all on board were presumed dead.

Excitement over the discovery was tempered by suggestions it could be from planes that went down in the region before, including a South African Airways Boeing 747 that crashed near the island of Mauritius in 1987, killing all 159 people on board.