Helderberg claims to TRC
Ann Eveleth
A list of 30 former and current parastatal officials and employees who allegedly played a role in the Helderberg air disaster has been handed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Commission representative Christelle Terreblanche says the list came from the Friends of the Victims of the Helderberg, which has played a ”large” role in the commission’s decision to investigate the 1987 disaster, in which 159 people were killed.
The group has also presented the commission with new evidence about the crash, Terreblanche says. The commission intends to probe questions which remain unanswered more than 10 years after the South African Airways (SAA) flight crashed into the Indian Ocean.
In an appeal handed to the commission last July, the group claimed the crash was ”cold-blooded murder”. It blamed the former government’s efforts to evade detection of its ”regular conveyance of highly dangerous cargo, for some considerable period, over certain of SAA’s European and Far East routes”, in contravention of sanctions.
This theory has been supported by independent forensic scientist Dr David Klatzow, one of 11 people invited to appear before the truth commission’s closed investigative inquiry from June 1 to June 3.
The truth commission’s chief investigator, Dumisa Ntsebeza, says the inquiry will probe ”aspects relating to the nature of the Helderberg’s cargo and the three-year investigation that culminated in an inquiry by Judge Cecil Margo”.
Margo’s inquiry failed to establish the cause of a fire which broke out on the plane before the crash, but rejected allegations that the aircraft had carried secret cargo.
Friends of the Victims of the Helderberg says those named in its submission to the truth commission include 18 people ”directly involved in the planning and execution” of the crash; seven who ”voluntarily co-operated in the very extensive ‘cover-up”’ which followed; and five who were ”not involved [but] were rapidly and cunningly put in place immediately after the crash”.
A representative of the group who is a former SAA employee says management ignored his warnings nine days before the crash that the airline should cease its transportation of dangerous cargo.
He blames the Helderberg’s failure to attempt an emergency landing when the flight encountered problems on fears that the cargo would be discovered by foreign aviation officials.
Ntsebeza says ”former and current Armscor agents and members of subsidiaries” are among those invited to appear before the inquiry.
n The Associated Families of the Rietbok Aircraft Tragedy asked the truth commission this week to explain its failure to institute a similar probe into the 1967 SAA Rietbok crash. The group said it had met truth commission investigators, but had received no response to its appeal.