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Kuala Lumpur: Australian experts have concluded winds and ocean currents could have pushed wreckage from MH370 more than 2000 kilometres to the remote Reunion Island from where the Malaysian airliner is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said Australia's CSIRO reached the conclusion in drift modelling commissioned by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
"For this reason, thorough and methodical search efforts will continue to be focused on the defined underwater search area, covering 120,000 square kilometres in the south Indian Ocean," he said.
Malaysian officials expect confirmation that a barnacle-encrusted wing part that washed up on Reunion Island last week is from MH370 will come at a laboratory in France early on Thursday.
The part known as a flaperon has already being identified as coming from a Boeing 777, the same type of plane as MH370.
The Malaysian plane with 239 people on board disappeared while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March last year in one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries.
Aviation experts have said there is no other plausible explanation for a Boeing 777 part to be found in the Indian Ocean unless it came from MH370 but Malaysian officials have urged people to be cautious about declaring the part as being from the plane until it has been forensically examined.
An expert from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau has flown to France to help examine the debris with officials from Malaysia, France, the United States and China, Mr Truss said.
Malaysian officials are playing down the finding of more debris on Reunion, an island near Madagascar, in the past few days, including what Fairfax Media's correspondent Colin Cosier reported as appearing to be from a sewing machine.
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, head of Malaysia's Department of Civil Aviation, said in France that there have been no new developments since the flaperon arrived at the testing laboratory in the French city of Toulouse on Saturday.
Malaysia's leaders could announce confirmation the debris is from MH30 in Kuala Lumpur as early as Thursday.
