France will take the lead on the investigation into a plane part suspected of being linked to a Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared over a year ago, a judicial official said, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Meeting behind closed doors at the a courthouse in central Paris, an antiterrorism judge laid out to authorities from four nations the procedures for the analysis of the debris, which was found last week on a beach in the French territory of Réunion, a small island off the east coast of Madagascar, the official said.
Present at the meeting were Malaysian law-enforcement and security officials, diplomats from China and Australia, and representatives of the BEA, France’s transportation police and air-safety investigation agency.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it had dispatched one of its own officials to France to help with the analysis of the part at a military lab near Toulouse.
For now, the judicial official said, the French probe is legally independent of the international investigation into Flight 370, which disappeared nearly 17 months ago on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
“The BEA is truly the go-between for the Malaysians and the French, because the BEA is part of the international investigation,” said the spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office after the meeting.
France has designated its own independent expert to lead the investigation.