SA to reopen Samora Machel case
10 February 2006
Twenty years after a plane crash on South African soil claimed the life of Mozambican President Samora Machel, the SA government is to reopen investigations into the case.
On Thursday Minister of Safety and Security Charles Nqakula announced that the government believed it had sufficient reason to investigate the mysterious death of the former Mozambican leader.
In his State of the Nation address a week ago, President Thabo Mbeki twice referred to the incident as "a plane crash that still requires a satisfactory explanation".
Nqakula gave his assurance that his department will make the investigation a priority. "We will deploy the best available resources, human and material, to deal with the matter," he said.
"We owe it to the people of Mozambique who assisted our liberation forces to topple apartheid and install the democratic dispensation that we have," he said.
The crash
On 19 October
1986, the Mozambican presidential aircraft, a Tupolev TU 134A-3 was returning from Zambia after the Lusaka Summit to be in time for the birthday of Graça Machel, Samora Machel's wife.
Machel and 24 others died when the plane crashed in the mountainous terrain near Mbuzini near Komatipoort, in what is now Mpumalanga. The crash site is in the little triangle where the borders of Swaziland and Mozambique meet the South African border in the Lebombo Mountains.
The apartheid government appointed the Margo Commission of Inquiry to investigate the crash, which concluded that it had been caused by pilot error. An investigation by a Soviet team found that a decoy beacon had caused the plane to stray off course before it crashed into the mountains.
A subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission inquiry into the incident did not find conclusive evidence to support either of these conclusions. Circumstantial evidence collected did, however, question the conclusions reached by the Margo Commission.
Security force involvement
The commission heard that of the 34 people on board the presidential aircraft at the time of the crash, only nine survived.
One of the survivors walked to a nearby house to ask for help. Arriving back at the scene, he found security force officers already there. Others who arrived to help, including a nurse, told the commission that they were chased from the site.
They also reported that the security force officers were seen rummaging through the wreckage and confiscating documents. Foreign Minister Pik Botha and Niel Barnard, head of the National Intelligence Service, admitted that documents had been removed from the scene for copying.
Mozambique was informed about the incident only a full nine hours after it happened, after a massive land and sea search. The commission heard evidence that the Mozambican Minister of Security contacted the South African security forces as soon as the Mozambican authorities realised the plane was missing. They were not informed about the accident.
At the time, Mozambique was a refuge for liberation forces fighting the apartheid regime.
In 1998 Machel's widow Graça married then South African President Nelson Mandela, making her unique in having been the first lady of two different nations.
Last Friday Graça Machel was reportedly overcome by emotion when the reopening of the investigation was mooted in Mbeki's speech.
"I am so moved, I can hardly talk," she told the Sunday Independent.
- Read the Truth and Reconciliation report on its inquiry into the death of Samora Machel.
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