WEDNESDAY, 4.00PM:
THE investigation into the circumstances surrounding the air crash that killed Mozambican president Samora Machel 12 years ago took a new twist on Wednesday when a Mpumalanga scrapyard owner claimed that wreckage in the possesion of police did not come from Machel’s plane.
African Eye News reports that Greg Duffey, of Duffey’s metal scrapyard in White River, insists that he bought the wreckage of the plane from an unknown church group in the border town of Komatipoort in 1987. Duffey said he was told at the time that the mangled Russian Tupolev was Machel’s. He recycled it at his scrapyard.
“It was definitely Machel’s plane. I still have a copy of the cheque I used to pay this strange Eljon church for the wreckage and am convinced that the wreckage and engine parts the police say is Machel’s are fake,” he said. Duffey added that the wreckage he bought included the plane’s engines and fuselage. The tail section was missing, he said.
“I chopped it all up and recycled it. I was therefore very surprised when I saw a Tonga police officer on TV recently claiming that they had the plane’s wreckage at their police station. It has to be fake,” said Duffey.
Tonga police station commander Captain Andrew Mtiwane said on Wednesday that he has no way of verifying whether the wreckage at his police station was actually from Machel’s plane. “The problem is that the plane wreckage was originally taken to Komatipoort after the accident and stored there until it was brought here on February 20 1989. That’s two years after the accident and we have no idea what happened in the interim,” he said.
Police director Agrippa Mabuza, the province’s chief investigator on the case, said that two wheels from Machel’s Tupolev jet have also been found on another farm in the Komatipoort area. He said the farmer claimed the artifacts were given to him as a free gift by the South African police officers who were initially investigating the case.
Meanwhile, Ngwenya Lodge owner Dave Fourie said on Wednesday that he would be prepared to sell the tail section of the plane being displayed as a trophy in his lodge bar. He said the tail section was on the lodge property when he bought it, adding that he would be prepared to sell the wreckage for R250000. He also confirmed that the bullet holes in the Mozambican state crest on the souvenir were the result of “target practice” by one of his employees using a shotgun.
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