(Bloomberg) -- A mystery that began with the disappearance of aMalaysian plane en route to China that detoured to the waters offAustralia’s coast has now spread across the Indian Ocean close toAfrica. Next stop: France.

Reunion, an island east of Madagascar where an aircraft partwashed up on shore and has been taken into police custody, is aterritory of France that sends eight legislators to France’sNational Assembly. The piece will be dispatched from Reunion Fridayand arrive on the French mainland Saturday to be examined nearToulouse, France’s Europe1 radio reported on its website.

“It’s a bit difficult when something lands in the great whiteoceans, because you don’t own the ocean more than 12 miles off yourcoastline,” Brian O’Keefe, a former vice president of theInternational Civil Aviation Organization’s generalassembly, said by phone from Canberra. “It’s an unusual case wherethe wreckage is found in a different jurisdiction to the placewhere the accident is thought to have happened.”

(Right: The small island of Reunion can be seen to the rightof Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Photo:pavalena/Shutterstock.com)

If the investigation shows the piece is from Malaysia AirlinesFlight 370, which vanished on March 8, 2014 with 239 people onboard, it won’t pinpoint the plane’s resting place. It would,though, give fresh momentum to search efforts off the coast ofAustralia that so far have failed to find any debris from thedoomed flight.

777 Part

“The sighting of this wreckage is consistent with the aircraftbeing located in the search area,” Australia’s Deputy PrimeMinister Warren Truss told a media conference in Canberra Friday.Investigators have been focusing on a remote stretch of ocean some3,800 kilometers (2,360 miles) southeast of Reunion.

“It’s only a small part of the aircraft, but it could be a veryimportant bit of evidence,” Truss said. “Assuming it is eventuallyidentified as wreckage from MH370, what this does is eliminate someof the theories that have been around.”

Some amateur sleuths have argued that the plane was hijacked andlanded in central Asia; that it was seen flying over the Maldivesdue south of India; or that it was shot down close to Diego Garcia,a U.S. naval base south of the Maldives.

A part number on the wing component confirms it was from a 777,the same model as MH370, according to a U.S. official, who wasn’tauthorized to speak about the investigation. French investigatorswill examine the piece under the supervision of Malaysianauthorities, the official said.

While investigators haven’t definitively determined that thepiece came from MH370, “it probably is from the plane,” O’Keefesaid. “There’s no record of anybody else reporting a piece fallingoff an airplane in this area.”

Meeting the Families

Malaysia Airlines identified the part as a flaperon, a movablepanel on the rear of the wing that’s used to bank the plane and canalso be moved to expand the wing’s size during takeoff and landing.Other than MH370, no 777s are known to have crashed in the IndianOcean.

The tattered remains of a suitcase also were found on a Reunionisland beach near where the wing part was discovered, according toa report by the Journal de L’ile de La Reunion.

Airline representatives will meet with passengers’ families inBeijing on Aug. 7 to discuss issues related to MH370, according toa note it sent to families Friday.

Flight 370 went missing after communication equipment on theaircraft stopped functioning and it veered from its course fromKuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew over the Indian Ocean.Investigators have concluded that someone on board intentionallydisabled tracking devices.

Based on pings between a satellite and the plane, searchersbelieve it flew until it ran out of fuel somewhere along an arcwest of Australia in the Indian Ocean.

Searchers have found no trace of the plane despite deep-seasonar scans of tens of thousands of square kilometers.

Overlapping Jurisdictions

As many as four jurisdictions are typically involved in anaccident investigation, O’Keefe said. These include the countrieswhere the aircraft operator is based and where the plane itself isregistered; the home country of the aircraft manufacturer; and thenation where the crash took place.

Crashes in international waters are especially complicated.Australia has led the undersea search for MH370 because the planeis thought to have crashed within the country’s vast search andrescue zone, which stretches about halfway to Africa.

For a definitive link to the Malaysian plane, investigatorswould look for serial numbers on one of the pieces within the flapor for inspection stamps, John Purvis, who used to head Boeing’saccident investigations unit, said in a phone interview. Boeing hasa record of all sub-components with serial numbers installed on anaircraft as it’s assembled, Purvis said.

“When an airplane crashes, one of the first things done isto freeze production records and manuals so that nothing isdestroyed,” he said.

(Right: Police officers look at the piece of debris inSaint-Andre, Reunion. Reunion 1ere via AP)

Reading Fractures

The piece may have been adrift for more than a year and batteredon the shoreline, but investigators still will attempt to tease outclues about what happened to the airplane it came from.

By studying fracture lines and the surface of the part,investigators may be able to determine how it sheared off the 777and whether the flaperon was extended at the time.

Flaperons are used when pilots slow a plane for landing, so theposition might provide a clue as to whether the pilots were incontrol of the plane during its final moments, he said.Investigators also could look at barnacles attached to the piece,which could provide insight into which waters the debris has passedthrough.

“There’s a lot of forensic evidence” lurking in the wreckage,said John Cox, a former airline captain and chief executive officerof Safety Operating Systems, an aviation consultant.

“The question is whether corrosion has compromised it,” hesaid.

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