UN finds black box of airplane that caused 800k deaths....

[MKSheppard]

...after 10 years of it sitting in a drawer in UN HQ...

**********

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/ ... 5540.shtml

The United Nations now intends to immediately send the black box - technically known as a flight data recorder - to "a qualified outside body for analysis of its contents" to determine whether it came from the plane that was carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, Eckhard said.

"On the face of it, there's no reason that we would think that that judgment made by those experts 10 years ago was faulty judgment, but to make sure we're going to send it out for analysis," he said.

Annan has also instructed the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the U.N. watchdog, "to look into exactly what happened 10 years ago," Eckhard said.

The April 6, 1994 crash killed Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, who had been attending a regional summit in Arusha, Tanzania.

When it became clear the plane had been shot down, Hutu extremists accused Tutsis of assassinating the Rwandan president and began attacking their longtime ethnic foes. The slaughter lasted about 100 days and claimed the lives of more than 500,000 people, most Tutsis.

The question of the black box came up during a French investigation of the crash, which also killed the French flight crew. Although the French have not released the results of their recently concluded probe, a newspaper familiar with the findings said it accuses the United Nations of obstruction of justice for failing to inspect the downed aircraft's black box.

The French newspaper Le Monde said the Air Safety Office at the U.N. Mission in Rwanda sent the black box to New York at the request of the head of the Air Safety Unit.

Annan, who was in charge of U.N. peacekeeping in 1994, said Thursday he was "incredulous" and "surprised" to learn that a black box had been found at the U.N. headquarters.

"From what I have picked up, it sounds like a real foul-up, first-class foul-up," he said. "I don't think there's been any attempt to cover-up and our legal office has been cooperating - from what I gathered - very effectively with the judge."

According to Le Monde newspaper, the French investigation concludes that the chief suspect in the plane's downing is Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a Tutsi who was the leader of a rebel movement at the time. The newspaper said its information was based on a report dated Jan. 30, but not yet turned over to French prosecutors.

Eckhard said U.N. officials on Wednesday "were able to trace the paper trail of a black box sent by pouch from the U.N. Mission in Rwanda in 1994 through Nairobi, Kenya, to U.N. headquarters in New York." It was discovered in a cabinet at the Air Safety Unit across the street from U.N. headquarters, he said.

The officials in charge apparently decided that "its pristine condition indicated that it had not been in a crash," Eckhard said.

As a result, they decided against sending the black box out to be opened, which was an expensive process, he said. They did circulate its index number but were unable to trace where it came from so they put it in the file cabinet "and did not report it up the chain of command," Eckhard said.

"None of the senior peacekeeping officials at the time had any knowledge of it," Eckhard said, and neither did then Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali or his staff.

The black box is now "under lock and key" at U.N. headquarters and a "responsible authority" to analyze it will be selected as soon as possible, he said.

Eckhard strssed that 1994 was "a very busy time" for U.N. peacekeeping, with 70,000 peackeepers deployed in about 18 missions around the world and just 200 staff at headquarters to manage them.

"You make quick judgments and move on to the next thing," he said. "It appears in the judgment of these air safety experts, this black box was not linked to a crash and they set it aside. ... It went into a drawer and was forgotten for 10 years."

[Stormbringer]

Better late than never. Right? Right?

[Xenophobe3691]

I say that if we find out that the Rwandan president wasn't assassinated, we slaughter 500,000+ Hutus. Show them how it feels.

I hope you realize I'm kidding...

[Montcalm]

GREAT with todays technology,the news of what happened took more time than the news of a king dieing in the Middle ages.

[TrailerParkJawa]

Should'nt the black box be in the hands of the company that owned the plane? Or am I missing something?

[Xenophobe3691]

Should'nt the black box be in the hands of the company that owned the plane? Or am I missing something?

You're missing something. So am I. So will a UN board of inquiry, until they look into it...