French investigators announced on Thursday that the flaperon found on Reunion Island belongs to the vanished Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. A technician from Airbus Defense and Space (ADS-SAU) in Spain, which manufactured the flaperon for the Boeing 777, formally identified one of the numbers found on the wing part as the serial number of the mysteriously missing plane, according to MSN News.
"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," a French prosecutor said in a statement.
The flaperon, which was discovered in July on the shores of a French island in the Indian Ocean, triggered a renewed interest in the ultimate fate of the mysterious flight, which disappeared with 239 people onboard in March 2014.
The wing part was then taken to France for a series of intensive examinations in a specialized laboratory in Toulouse last month. The Malaysian Prime Minister Nakib Razak already announced last month that the flaperon was indeed from MH370.
The French investigators however, were a lot more conservative, opting to conduct more tests to fully determine the origin of the Boeing 777 wing part, reported CNN.
France has also launched a criminal probe into the plane's disappearance, mainly because four French nationals were aboard. The plane was flying from Kuala Lumpur and was en route to Beijing when it disappeared somewhere over the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam.
