Military

12 March 2004 – A "black box" sent to United Nations Headquarters in New York from Rwanda in 1994 - that was discovered earlier this week and alleged in press reports to be from the downed aircraft carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi - has been turned over to the UN's top watchdog official.

The flight data recorder was given to Under-Secretary-General Dileep Nair, head of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), who is inquiring into the circumstances in which senior officials were not informed that it had reached UN Headquarters, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

Yesterday Mr. Eckhard announced that after an internal inquiry - prompted by reporters' questions - a black box turned up on Wednesday in a locked filing cabinet in the Air Safety Unit of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. Following the discovery, Secretary-General Kofi Annan ordered OIOS - the UN's in-house watchdog - to look into exactly what happened 10 years ago and how the UN came into possession of the device.

A recent article in the French newspaper Le Monde alleged that the UN was given the flight data recorder from the Falcon aircraft that crashed on 6 April 1994 in Rwanda, killing President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and his Burundian counterpart Cyprian Ntayamira. Their deaths set off a chain of killings and massacres throughout Rwanda that year, with the death toll from the genocide mounting to more than 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis and "moderate" Hutu.

According to Mr. Eckhard, the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) was consulted and advised that the recorder should be sent to an agency competent to read out its contents in the presence of an ICAO monitor.

"The arrangements required are under way, and the black box will be carried by hand for the read out," he said. "When this is received by the United Nations, the next steps will be decided."