Black box opens new questions
2004-03-11 20:44
Brussels - The United Nations said on Thursday it had received an aircraft's black box after the 1994 plane crash which sparked the genocide in Rwanda, and would turn it over to outside investigators.
The announcement came after France's Le Monde published details of a French investigation which said UN officials blocked the inquiry into the April 6 1994 crash of the plane that killed Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana.
His plane was shot down by rockets in what the inquiry said was an attack ordered by President Paul Kagame. The report in Le Monde also said the United Nations had received the plane's black box.
UN spokesperson Fred Eckhard told reporters the world body had indeed received an aircraft's black box, which was discovered this week after the French paper published its report.
But, he said the "paper trail" which led to the device's finding indicated that UN officials at the time apparently concluded that the device was in "pristine condition" and could not have been involved in a crash.
Massacre was launched
"We don't know enough yet," he said. "We are in the process of looking at the paper trail."
The device was found in a locked filing cabinet in a search conducted after the newspaper report was published.
A day after Habyarimana's death, the massacre of up to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus was launched by the majority Hutu army and extremist militias.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was the head of UN peacekeepers when the genocide occurred, said on Wednesday he was unaware there had been any obstruction into the French inquiry.
Eckhard told reporters that Annan and other top peacekeeping officials at the time had "no knowledge" that the world body was in possession of the device, which apparently was sent "two to three months" after the plane crash.
He said Annan had ordered a full investigation into the incident, and that he wanted to know how the box could have been put in storage without senior officials being told about it.
"The secretary-general wants to know exactly what went on 10 years ago that this matter wasn't reported up the chain (of command)," he said.