Relatives of people who went missing on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have retrieved what they believe are new pieces of debris from the aircraft.
Victim’s families say they will present the pieces of the doomed jet to the Malaysian government this week.
Flight MH370 was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, when it disappeared and became one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.
Malaysian and international investigators believe the jet veered thousands of miles off course from its scheduled route before eventually plunging into the Indian Ocean.
Missing Boeing 777 aircraft taking off at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport in France, 2011
Last year scientists used a reconstructed Boeing 777 flaperon to work out where pieces of the jet could have drifted after debris washed up on Reunion island off the coast of Africa in 2015
The cause of the planes sudden diversion off course is still not known.
In all, 27 pieces of aircraft debris have been collected from various places around the world but only three wing fragments that washed up along the Indian Ocean coast have been confirmed to be from the missing Boeing 777.
The next of kin said in a brief statement on Wednesday they would meet Malaysia’s transport minister on Friday ‘to hand over newly recovered debris’.
Calvin Shim, whose wife was a crew member on the plane, told Reuters that the group planned to hand over five pieces of debris found off Madagascar, where some debris has been found before.
The most recent discovery was in August, he said.
In May, Malaysia called off a three-month search by U.S. firm Ocean Infinity, which spanned 112,000 sq km (43,243 sq miles) in the southern Indian Ocean and ended with no significant findings.
Reconstruction of doomed flight MH370 which is thought to have crashed into the sea after veering thousands of miles off course
It was the second major search after Australia, China and Malaysia ended a fruitless A$200 million ($144.80 million) search across an area of 120,000 sq km (46,332 sq miles) last year.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad had said in May that the country would consider resuming the search only if new clues come to light.
In July, investigators released a 495-page report, saying the plane’s controls were likely deliberately manipulated to take it off course but they were not able to determine who was responsible.
Hijacking was not ruled out as the reason behind the plane diverting from its course.
Sarah Nor (centre), the mother of Norliakmar Hamid, a passenger on flight MH370 crying at the Ministry of Transport headquarters in Putrajaya, Malaysia, in July when the final report was released
The official search for the plane ended in May but a new TV documentary revealed for the first time the plane’s suspected final moments, with a reconstruction showing it plunging towards the sea in a ‘death spiral’.
Investigators on the documentary said the plane almost certainly ran out of fuel after flying in the wrong direction over the Indian Ocean for six hours.
This could have been caused by the right engine breaking down first, meaning the autopilot would have lurched the plane to the left to compensate.
In July 2015, a wing part known as a flaperon was found on Reunion Island, east of Madagascar. Since then, 27 pieces of debris have been found.
One of the pieces was a TV monitor, found by amateur wreckage hunter Blaine Gibson.
Officers carrying pieces of debris from what is thought to be flight MH370 washed ashore in Saint-Andre de la Reunion on Reunion Island in July 2015
Last month a pilot claimed to have discovered parts of flight MH370 in the same area of the Cambodian jungle where a filmmaker was forced to abandon his pursuit of the plane’s wreckage because of ‘illegal loggers high on meth’.
Daniel Boyer said he has found the engine, tail and cockpit of the plane buried in the jungle north of Phnom Penh using Google Earth, just a month after British film producer Ian Wilson embarked on a two-day trek to find a ‘plane-shaped object’ he had sighted on Google Maps.
French police also said last month that officers were investigating if navigation data from MH370 could have been hacked to disguise the route it took before crashing into the ocean.
The new theory was revealed by Ghyslain Wattrelos, a Frenchman who lost his wife and two teenage children when Flight 370 vanished.
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