By P Prem Kumar

KUALA LUMPUR

Malaysia's transport minister has confirmed that a piece of plane debris recovered from Mauritius originated from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

Liow Tiong Lai said an investigation carried out by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) had identified the piece to be a trailing edge splice strap from a Boeing 777's left outboard flap.

The bureau arrived at the decision after a part number found on a section of debris matched records from missing Flight MH370, Liow said in a statement Friday.

He added that the debris was found on the Indian Ocean island in May this year, and it took five months for the bureau to retrieve and carefully it.

"Adjacent to the part number was a second part identifier. The flap manufacturer supplied records indicating that this work order number was incorporated into the outboard flap shipset line number 404," the minister said.

"This corresponds to the Boeing 777 aircraft line number 404, registered as 9M-MRO [MH370]."

The debris is the latest piece to have been examined, analysed and identified as having originated from MH370, following earlier confirmation of debris found in Tanzania.

Flight MH370 -- carrying 239 passengers and crew -- disappeared from radar shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

The plane has yet to be found despite massive search operations in the southern Indian Ocean, where the aircraft is believed to have ended its flight after diverting from its original route.

The search and rescue mission -- which began immediately after -- involved some 160 assets as well as experts from 25 countries.

To-date, at least six pieces of debris found along Africa’s east coast have been confirmed as “almost certainly” coming from MH370.

After 10 months of intensive undersea search for the vanished flight, on Jan. 29 2015 Malaysia declared MH370 was lost in an accident, killing all passengers.

On July 29 last year, a piece of aircraft debris was found washed ashore east of Madagascar. The debris -- believed to be from a Boeing 777 -- was sent to Toulouse, France, for analysis the following day.

Days after, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that the flaperon was from MH370, and that the flight had ended in the Indian Ocean.

On July 22, a ministerial tripartite meeting decided to suspend the search operations for MH370, after competing the current earmarked 120,000 square kilometers search area.