Plane Wreck in Philippines "Containing Skeleton" Not MH370 Authorities Say

Authorities in the Philippines have ruled out suggestions that plane wreckage reportedly found on an island in the south of the country is of missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370.

A resident, Jamil Omar, had reported to police on the weekend that his teenage nephew had found aircraft wreckage, with the Malaysian flag painted on its side, crashed on Sugbay Island in Tawi Tawi.

​Mr Omar's nephew, who was hunting for birds with his friends at the time, also reported that inside the wreckage there were human bones, including a skeleton in the pilot's chair with the seatbelt still fastened, The Straits Times reported.

The report raised speculation that the wreckage could have been that of MH370, which vanished in March last year on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board.

However, Captain Giovanni Carlo Bacordo, the commander of Naval Task Force 61 in the Philippines, told Malaysia's The Star Online that suggestions that the wreckage may have been from MH370 were not true.

"We deployed a gunboat there because of the news. We interviewed the people at the Sugbay Island, the fishermen, but they have no knowledge about it," he said.

"Even the people residing in the island for the longest time have no knowledge of this."

A senior Philippines police official told The Straits Times that there had been no reports of any aircraft crashing on any of their islands

He said if any aircraft had "gone down in our area there would have been alerts from civil aviation authorities".

"To date, there has been none," he said.

In July this year, a piece of the missing plane's wing, known as a flaperon, was found on the shore of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, about 7600 kilometres from Sugbay Island.

A technician from Airbus Defence and Space, which had made the part for Boeing, formally identified one of three numbers found on the flaperon as being the serial number of the MH370 Boeing 777.

The disappearance of MH370 last year triggered one of the largest searches for an aircraft focusing in the Southern Indian Ocean.