Malaysia Airlines towelette packet washes up on Australian beach

Want China Times, Xinhua and Staff Reporter 2015-03-10

Cards hanging from a wishing tree express prayers for the passengers on
board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 at a ceremony in Kuala
Lumpur on April 6, 2014, a month after the plane disappeared. (File photo/Xinhua)

Investigators searching for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 have been sent an unwrapped towelette packet that was found on the shores of a beach in Western Australia.

The packet, bearing the Malaysian Airlines logo, may hold clues to the whereabouts of the aircraft which went missing over a year ago and is believed to have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean.

A retired couple found the packet and immediately sent it to local police, who on Tuesday delivered it to the offices of the Joint Agency Coordination Center (JACC) in Canberra.

The JACC has refused to release a photo of the package however and is distancing itself from reports that it may be a significant discovery. Instead, the JACC has suggested that it is "unlikely" to be linked with the missing aircraft.

Cervantes beach in Western Australia, where the packet was found, is around 220 kilometers from Fremantle and 1,850 kilometers from the main search area in the southern Indian Ocean. However, experts have previously stated that floating objects from the plane could travel long distances without being damaged.

Last Sunday represented the one-year anniversary of the plane's disappearance en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with all 239 passengers on board still unaccounted for, the majority of them Chinese nationals.