Military

15 March 2004 – Arrangements are being made to transport a "black box" which originated in Rwanda to the United States National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, D.C., for analysis in the presence of an official from the United Nations civil aviation agency, a UN spokeswoman said today.

The cockpit voice recorder discovered on UN premises last week is still in the custody of Dileep Nair, the head of the UN's Office of Oversight Services (OIOS), while the arrangements are being made, spokeswoman Marie Okabe said at a press briefing in New York.

UN officials will retain custody of the black box throughout the analysis, she added. The UN official present during the analysis will be from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

Last week the UN announced that after an internal inquiry - prompted by reporters' questions - a black box turned up 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 black box 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" Hutus.