Story ID: 
France Continues Judicial Probe into MH370 Disappearance
By: Cathy Buyck
Caption: Final safety investigation report released by Malaysian government last month.
Word Count: 269
The international team conducting the safety investigation into the March 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has ended its work, but France’s Gendarmerie of Air Transport is carrying on with its judicial investigation into the accident.

“Our investigation continues; we did not reopen it because we never closed it,” an official of the Gendarmerie des Transports Aériens (GTA) confirmed to AIN. “France is still the only country investigating the accident,” he noted. He declined to confirm reports in French media that the GTA is looking to verify technical data collected during the safety investigation, specifically data from Inmarsat that tracked the aircraft’s pings to the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia. “We can’t comment as the investigation is ongoing,” he said.

The GTA, a division of the French gendarmerie dedicated to protecting civil aviation against acts of unlawful interference, opened its probe into the MH370 disappearance because four French victims were on board the flight. MH370 debris, a flaperon of the Boeing 777-200ER, was found on Réunion Island, a French department in the Indian Ocean, in July 2015.

The final safety investigation report into the MH370 disappearance, released last month, reached no conclusions about the ultimate cause, but authorities determined that the changes to the flight path probably did not result from “anomalous systems issues” alone, suggesting at least some human intervention in the resulting diversion.

The French air accident investigation bureau BEA was part of the MH370 international safety investigation team, comprising 19 Malaysians and accredited representatives of safety investigation authorities from seven countries.