French prosecutors have said "with certainty" that the wing part found on Reunion island is from missing Malaysian Airlines plane MH370, it has been reported.
In a statement on their findings, the Paris prosecutor's office said the investigators used maintenance records to match a serial number found on the flaperon with the missing plane.
The Boeing 777 disappeared without a trace on 8 March, 2014, with 239 people on board.
In July, the flaperon was found washed up on the shores of Reunion, a small French island in the southern Indian Ocean.
French gendarmes inspect the wing piece on the island of Reunion on 29 July (Reuters)
After it arrived on the island, having apparently drifted thousands of miles across the ocean from the search zone near Australia, it was hastily taken to Toulouse in France for analysis.
"Today it is possible to state with certainty that the flaperon discovered on Reunion July 29, 2015 corresponds with that of Flight MH370," the prosecutor's statement said.
Since the flaperon was discovered, additional pieces of debris that investigators suspected may be from the plane have also been taken to France for analysis.
On 5 August, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak confirmed in a press conference that the debris did indeed come from MH370.
However, in another press conference in France on the same night, Paris prosecutor Serge Mackowiak declined to definitely confirm whether the debris was from the missing Boeing, instead saying that experts had "very strong suppositions" that the debris was from MH370.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said that the wing part was from MH370 on 6 August - but French investigators weren't so definite (AFP/Getty)
Now the investigations have produced an answer, we can be more certain about the fate of MH370. However, the questions of how and why it crashed are likely to go unanswered for much longer.
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