South Africa’s Deputy President Jacob Zuma promised Mozambicans on Saturday that the truth about an air crash that claimed the life of their communist leader Samora Machel in 1986 would be uncovered.
Machel, Mozambique’s first president, died while returning from a Southern African Development Community peace summit in Zambia when the plane he was travelling in crashed in northern South Africa on October 19 1986.
”Mozambique even sacrificed its revolutionary leader Samora Machel, for our cause,” Zuma said at a church service in the capital Maputo in memory of 12 militants from South Africa’s ruling African National Congress who were killed by apartheid agents near Maputo in 1981.
South African investigators claimed that Machel’s accident was caused by human error but the Mozambican government dismissed their findings.
Mozambican experts said the plane had been diverted from its course by a pirate radio beacon operating on the same frequency as a similar one used at Maputo airport.
The Russian-built Tupolec aircraft later slammed into a group of hills.
Zuma said the South African government would not rest until the truth about the crash was revealed.
”The uncovering of the truth around Samora Machel’s death will be an important way of thanking Mozambique for its sacrifice for our country,” he told the religious ceremony, which was attended by Methodist clergymen and bishops, politicians and members of the ANC.
South Africans voted in their first multiracial election in April 1994, when the former freedom fighter Nelson Mandela was elected as president.
”There are no words in any human language to describe Mozambique’s sacrifice for our freedom and democracy,” Zuma said. — Sapa-AFP