Horror rescue mission

2003-06-27 21:51

Antoinette Pienaar

Windhoek - A paramedic who narrowly escaped death in a helicopter crash on the deck of the sinking Jolly Rubino cargo ship on the Kwazulu-Natal coast eight months ago, is one of the six people killed in a double tragedy in Namibia.

Four of the victims were South African.

Machal Naudé, 28, died when the aircraft sent to fetch a woman injured in a car accident, crashed near the Gamsberg pass, about 170km from Windhoek.

The emergency flight crashed on Thursday evening in cold, windy weather about 1km from the car wreck. Two South African women died in the car crash.

Naudé, John Branca, the pilot, Daria Smith, 22, medical assistant and their patient, 32-year-old Charmaine Williams, were burnt to death when their fixed-wing aircraft flew into the side of the Gamsberg. The cause of the accident remains shrouded in mystery. It's being investigated by the civil aviation authorities in Namibia.

Dr Fraser Lamond of International SOS says: "We received an emergency call on Thursday afternoon, asking for assistance after a car crash in which two tourists, Arlene de Bruyn, an environmental expert of the National Botanical Gardens in Pretoria and Najmunisa Gaffoor of the Goldfields environmental education centre at Kirstenbosch in Cape Town were killed.

They attended the congress in Windhoek of the association for environmental education in Southern Africa along with Williams.

De Bruyn was in her thirties, married and the mother of a one-year-old son. Gaffoor was not married while Williams, attached to the WWF in Stellenbosch, was a single mother of a 13-year-old girl.

Dagmar Muhlbauer, a friend of the Naudé couple of Richards Bay, says Naudé's wife, Anneke, is "totally shocked". She went to Windhoek on Friday to identify her husband's body.

Naudé is expecting the couple's first child.

- Beeld