Airplane debris that washed up on an Indian Ocean island that is believed to be from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 arrived in France Saturday.

A truck carrying the debris -- a 2-meter-long (6.5-feet) piece of the wing known as a flaperon -- left Orly, near Paris, for a French military site in Balma, in southwestern France, near Toulouse.

The lab, staffed by 600 experts, specializes in analyzing aviation wreckage.

At the site, French aviation experts will try to establish whether the wing piece was part of the Boeing 777 that disappeared March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.

French authorities have imposed extraordinary secrecy, putting the piece of wreckage under police protection in the hours before it left the island of Reunion.

Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told Reuters in Kuala Lumpur Saturday that additional Malaysian officials were headed to Reunion to look for more debris and others would go to France.

Air safety investigators, including one from Boeing, have identified the component as a flaperon from the trailing edge of a Boeing 777 wing, a U.S. official said. The official wasn't authorized to be publicly identified.

Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, told reporters Friday authorities hoped to confirm the origin of the piece in the coming hours.