Kansas City Star March 11, 2004
Kansas firm offers details on sale of seized plane
By Scott Canon
A Rantoul, Kan., firm says it faxed to the American Embassy in South Africa on Wednesday sale documents for an airliner seized by Zimbabwe authorities claiming it ferried mercenaries.
The nearly 40-year-old plane was seized by President Robert Mugabe's forces on Sunday. The government says that instead of carrying just a crew of seven as claimed, the plane had 64 persons aboard along with supplies that might be construed as military materiel.
A tail number from the plane suggested that it was registered in the United States to Dodson Aviation in Rantoul. The company, however, said the federal registry is lagging behind its sale of the Boeing 727-100 turbo jet.
Company director Robert Dodson Sr. said the sale was completed March 1, after weeks of negotiations with Logo Logistics Co., a firm he believed to be a South African diamond mining company.
"There didn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary about the deal," Dodson said. "They negotiated very hard to get a cheap price. . Actually, we didn't make any money on the deal."
The embassy staff contacted Dodson Aviation on Tuesday, and the requested records were sent Wednesday.
Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Paul Turk said there were no restrictions on who could purchase an airliner. It is normal for evidence of sales to take up to a month to show up in FAA records, he said.
The company contracted a crew to make the flight to South Africa. Dodson said the crew handed over the plane to officials who signed for it in the name of Logo Logistics late Friday or early Saturday.
Sunday night at Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe, the government impounded the aircraft and jailed its occupants. Later this week, state television showed sleeping bags, satellite phones, knives, bolt cutters and green camouflage uniforms that were said to have been the plane's cargo. No firearms were shown.
State television also said the plane was linked to the South African firm Executive Outcomes, notorious for employing apartheid-era South African soldiers in mercenary causes. It also said the people aboard included 20 South Africans and groups of Angolans, Congolese, Namibians, Congolese and one Zimbabwean.
"One man's mercenary is another man's security guard," said John Pike, a defense expert at GlobalSecurity.org. "That's an awful lot of security guards. The problem that you've got in Africa . is that anybody who can shoot their way into the national palace is president."
So, he said, Mugabe could feel legitimately threatened by a suspicious planeload of men. But the president has also maintained political control by playing on nationalist fears of the white minority that once ruled and that still owns much of the country, formerly known as Rhodesia. That could give Mugabe an incentive to portray mine workers as plotting mercenaries, Pike said.
The crew members reportedly said they were headed to the Congo and Burundi on mineral mining operations.
A South African firm called Dodson Aviation Maintenance and Spare Parts was identified in a United Nations report as having carried arms to Liberia in 1998.
Robert Dodson said that that firm was not related to Dodson Aviation and that the name was a coincidence. Dodson International Parts SA in South Africa is a division of the Kansas firm, he said, but was not involved in the sale of the Boeing jet.
Dodson said he had been overwhelmed by calls about the sale.
"We did everything the way we were supposed to," he said.
© Copyright 2004, The Kansas City Star
