Hawks probing Samora Machel crash
2012-12-12 20:25
Johannesburg - South African investigators have
launched an investigation into the plane crash that killed neighbouring
Mozambique's Marxist president Samora Machel 26 years ago, police said
Wednesday.
"I do confirm the Hawks are investigating
circumstances surrounding the crash," said Paul Ramaloko, spokesman for
South Africa's specialised investigative police, which heads the probe.
During
the Cold War, Machel's Russian Tupolev airplane crashed into the
Lebombo mountains just a few kilometres from the border between
Mozambique, South Africa and Swaziland on the night of 19 October 1986.
An
inquiry led by South Africa's fervently anti-communist government
blamed the Russian crew for the accident which killed 35 of the 44
aboard, including government ministers and academics.
But some believe a decoy radio signal had deceived the pilot into flying lower than was safe.
At
the time there was friction between apartheid South Africa and its
socialist neighbour, and South Africa secretly funded a civil war to
undermine the Frelimo government.
Machel's widow Graça, who is currently married to Nelson Mandela, has called repeatedly for a proper investigation.
Despite
commitments from then-president Nelson Mandela and his successor Thabo
Mbeki, recommendations to reopen the investigation into the crash were
never carried out.
After the end of white minority rule South
Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission held a closed session into
the crash in 1994.
Last week crime scene experts took "aerial
photos and GPS readings" at a military zone in the eastern Mpumalanga
province which sent aerial information to military bases in the region,
South African daily The Times reported Wednesday.
Shocked by the
death of their liberation hero and first president since 1975
independence from Portugal, the case looms large on Mozambique's
national psyche.
"You reopen the wounds as you go through the
details how the day started, how you were informed [of the crash],
because there is no closure," Machel's widow Graça told AFP in 2011.
She married Mandela in 1998.
- SAPA
