PARIS — Investigators and the families of those who were aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 now have what they have sought for more than a year — the first tangible trace of the vanished airplane.
There are “very strong presumptions” that the airplane part that washed ashore last week on the French island of Réunion in the western Indian Ocean came from the missing Boeing 777, an official said on Wednesday at a Paris news conference after experts inspected the object.
A few minutes before the news conference, Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia went further, declaring that the object definitely came from the plane, which disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people aboard.
A person involved in the investigation said, however, that experts from Boeing and the National Transportation Safety Board who had seen the object, a piece of what is known as a flaperon, were not yet fully satisfied, and called for further analysis.
Their doubts were based on a modification to the flaperon part that did not appear to exactly match what they would expect from airline maintenance records, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
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French and Malaysian officials did not share the American hesitation, not least because no other Boeing 777 is unaccounted for.
“Today, 515 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Réunion Island is indeed from MH370,” Mr. Najib said in a televised statement broadcast in the early hours of Thursday in Malaysia.
At the news conference, Serge Mackowiak, the deputy Paris prosecutor, discussed what officials and experts from France, Malaysia, Australia and the United States had learned from examining the flaperon part in an aviation lab in Toulouse, France.
He said representatives from Boeing had confirmed that it came from a Boeing 777, based on its size, color, joint structure and other technical characteristics. He also said that “technical documentation” provided by Malaysia Airlines had enabled experts to establish “common technical characteristics” between the debris and Flight 370’s flaperons.
Boeing said in a statement that its technicians were assisting in the analysis of the part, but declined to comment on the results of the examination.
The person involved in the investigation said no serial or other unique number had been found, making the job of conclusively identifying the object more complicated. The person also said that so far, no burn marks or other evidence of physical damage had been found that might provide clues to the circumstances in which the plane went down.
In any case, experts have cautioned that the discovery of the object is unlikely to tell investigators enough to determine exactly what happened to the plane.
GRAPHIC
How Missing Jet’s Debris Could Have Floated to Réunion
This animation shows where floating debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 could have drifted if experts are correct about where the plane went down.
On the night of March 8, 2014, while bound for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Flight 370 veered off its planned course less than an hour after takeoff and stopped communicating with ground controllers. Radar data and satellite signals show that it turned to fly west across the Malay Peninsula and then south over the Indian Ocean, where it is presumed to have run out of fuel and crashed in very deep water, killing everyone aboard.
Months of extensive air and sea search efforts failed to find any trace of the aircraft in the sea. The authorities in Malaysia and Australia, which is leading the search, reacted cautiously after the discovery on Réunion.
After a year of searches and false leads, relatives of the passengers greeted the news with caution. State news media in China, where more than half the passengers were from, warned that even if the debris proved to have come from Flight 370, the body of the plane was still missing.
It has become increasingly clear that the object is a part of a Boeing 777 flaperon, a movable section of the wing that helps stabilize the plane while flying at low speeds and during takeoff and landing.
Réunion was thrust into the international spotlight after the discovery, prompting many to scour its beaches for more clues. No other debris has been confirmed as coming from the flight, though one other object, apparently remnants of a piece of luggage, was sent to France for examination. Mr. Mackowiak, the deputy prosecutor, said Wednesday that it had not yet been analyzed.
Experts warn that the complex movements of ocean currents and sea winds over so long a time would make it extremely difficult to trace the debris back to locate other wreckage.
Officials said the flaperon part found on Réunion, made from composite materials with a lightweight honeycomb interior, could float for months, unlike many other parts, which are most likely at the bottom of the ocean.
Australia is leading the underwater search for the plane, while the Malaysian authorities are conducting the broader investigation into the plane’s disappearance. French prosecutors have begun an investigation of their own because there were four French citizens on the flight, and the flaperon part is being examined in France because it washed up on French territory.
Warren Truss, deputy prime minister of Australia, said in Sydney that the discovery did not change calculations of where to look for the plane. His country’s national science agency has confirmed that material from the current search area could have been carried by currents to Réunion, thousands of miles west of the remote stretch of deep ocean where the plane is believed to have gone down, Mr. Truss said.
Material could also have reached “other locations, as part of a progressive dispersal of floating debris through the action of ocean currents and wind,” Mr. Truss said in the statement, which was issued hours before the announcement about the examination of the wing part.
“For this reason, thorough and methodical search efforts will continue to be focused on the defined underwater search area, covering 120,000 square kilometers, in the southern Indian Ocean,” Mr. Truss said. That area, equivalent to about 46,000 square miles, was expanded in April by the authorities.
By Wednesday afternoon, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said that about half the search area had been combed, and that there would be a short break while the two search vessels returned to port for supplies.
In Beijing, relatives of the victims responded to Mr. Najib’s announcement with skepticism or outright disbelief. About 20 of them gathered outside the building in the eastern part of the city where Malaysia Airlines has its offices, demanding to talk to airline representatives and to fly to Réunion. More than 150 of the 239 passengers and crew members aboard the plane were Chinese nationals.
Some of the relatives held signs with slogans such as “Malaysia hides the truth” and “Malaysia, we want the truth, not compensation.” More than two dozen police officers barred them from entering the building.
“This is a lie,” said Dai Shuqin, whose sister was aboard the aircraft. “Relatives are alive somewhere. Why did the Malaysian prime minister make his announcement before the French experts? Why? This is not an accident but an artificial move. I refuse to believe it.”
Other relatives were more sanguine, but still expressed skepticism and demanded more information. Wen Wancheng, 63, whose son was on the aircraft, said finding one wing part did not resolve the mystery of what happened to the plane and why it strayed off course. “The sort of closure the families want,” he said in a telephone interview, “is to know what exactly happened to the plane and have the bodies returned.”
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