In what Secretary-General Kofi Annan called a "first class foul-up," the UN said it discovered a black box sent from Rwanda after a 1994 plane crash that unleashed a genocide in the African nation.
The black box was found in a locked filing cabinet in the UN Peacekeeping Department's Air Safety Unit, where it was put by aviation experts who apparently believed its "pristine condition" ruled out the possibility that it came from the downed Falcon 50 aircraft, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said on Thursday.
The UN now intends to immediately send the black box to "a qualified outside body for analysis of its contents" to determine whether it did or didn't come 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 UN watchdog, "to look into exactly what happened 10 years ago," Eckhard said.
The April 6, 1994 crash of the Falcon killed Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, who had been attending a regional summit in Arusha, Tanzania. The genocide in Rwanda began as news of Habyarimana's death spread, and by the time it ended more than 500,000 people had been killed.
Annan said he asked UN peacekeeping officials to investigate a report last week in the French newspaper Le Monde which said an investigation into the crash had accused the UN of obstruction -- because the world body never opened the downed aircraft's black box which was sent to UN headquarters in New York.
Le Monde said the Air Safety Office at the UN Mission in Rwanda sent the box to New York at the request of the head of the Air Safety Unit.
Eckhard said on Thursday that he had denied the existence of a black box and ridiculed the idea after checking with senior UN officials.
Annan, who was in charge of UN peacekeeping in 1994, said he was "incredulous" and "surprised" when he was told that a black box had been found at the UN.
"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."
An independent report on the UN role in the genocide, commissioned by Annan, concluded in 1999 that the UN and its members lacked the political will and resources to prevent or stop the genocide.
The US, in particular, blunted any efforts to get the Security Council more deeply involved in the Rwanda crisis in 1994.
Annan and then-US President Bill Clinton both apologized to Rwandans in the late 1990s for the failure of will that allowed the genocide to run unchecked.
According to Le Monde, the six-year investigation led by France's top anti-terrorism judge concludes that the chief suspect in the fatal attack on the plane is former rebel leader and the nation's current leader Paul Kagame. The paper said the investigation's report, dated Jan. 30, 2004, that has not yet been turned over to the Paris prosecutor's office.
Eckhard said UN officials on Wednesday "were able to trace the paper trail of a black box sent by pouch from the UN Mission in Rwanda in 1994 through Nairobi, Kenya to UN headquarters in New York.
"It was discovered in a cabinet at the Air Safety Unit across the street from UN headquarters, he said.
The officials in charge apparently decided that "its pristine condition indicated that it had not been in a crash," Eckhard said.
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