Bribery Charges Fly As Fatal Crash Reveals Tangled Web Of False
Documents, Smuggled Goods
As ANN reported earlier
in the week, an Antonov An-12 cargo plane crashed Saturday
afternoon in Uganda, killing pilot Vladimir Emelyanov, co-pilot
Vitaly Smetankiy, and four other crew members: Mikhail Matvyeev,
Alexandr Bitkin, Alexandr Miebvrbev, and Andrei Morozov. All of the
victims are Russians. But while investigators from Uganda's Civil
Aviation Authority continue to examine the wreckage of the
ex-military cargo plane, the Ugandan press has been more interested
in what the plane was doing -- and the wide discrepancy between
that and what it was supposed to be doing.
According to The Monitor of Kampala, the
Congolese-registered plane was laden with what appears to be
commercial cargo: beans, t-shirts and other items promoting
cellular phones, and two vehicles: a Jeep Cherokee and Toyota RAV4,
luxury SUVs by African standards. The cargo appears to
have been consigned to Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo. The only
problem with that is that it's not what the cargo manifest was
supposed to be, or what the flight plan said.
The operator Service Air Ltd. was -- according to the flight
plan --operating a flight delivering relief supplies into the
war-torn northeastern corner of the Congo, not commercial cargo to
Kinshasa (which is in the west of the large African country, on the
Atlantic coast). The flight originated at the Entebbe Old Airport,
a formerly dual-use airfield now under the control of the Ugandan
military. (This is the facility from which Israeli commandos
rescued hijack victims from terrorists in 1976). The Monitor
suggests that a payment of US $300 opens many doors on the military
base; the New Vision, a competing newspaper, fingered the recipient
of the $300 bribe as one Captain Kazungu. The Army indignantly says
that Service Air paid the civil aviation authority $640 in "fees."
The true facts may be lost forever in a welter of stonewalling and
finger-pointing.
Service Air owner Yevgeny Zakharov did not address the smuggling
or bribery accusations in an interview with Russian news agency
ITAR-TASS.
News reports from time to time have suggested that many of the
foreign military units operating in the Congo, ostensibly as
peacekeepers, have instead been looting the troubled nation of its
mineral wealth, which largely stems from the lawless war zone. Or
as The Monitor put it in an editorial calling for an investigation:
"There have reports in the press some years back of influential
officers in security organizations engaging in business between
Uganda and the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] using the Old
Airport and evading both the CAA [Civil Aviation Authority] and the
URA [Uganda Revenue Authority] at Entebbe Customs. We have also
witnessed the UN and the Justice Porter Commission investigating
possible plunder by Uganda army officers of resources from the DRC,
much of it via the Old Airport."
The Ugandan papers take
a dim view not only of smuggling, but also of the airworthiness of
some of the "relief" planes flying from Old Entebbe. "[T]his
particular security zone abets serious law breaking like smuggling
and allowing non-airworthy aircraft to take off, and to land," The
Monitor said, referring again to "dangerous planes with illicit
merchandise."
The An-12 is a very common cargo lifter in parts of the world;
many thousands of them were built. After the Soviet Union came
apart, Russia and the other former Soviet republics all downsized
their militaries substantially, and the flag carrier Aeroflot shed
many military-type cargo aircraft. Since then, it has been
extremely common to see AN-8s and -12s, Mil Mi-8 and -17
helicopters, and other former Soviet types in the hard corners of
the third world. Usually flown by Russian or Ukrainian contract
pilots, these types are respected for their durability, and they
are inexpensive to buy or hire. The high fuel burn of the An-12
compared to Western equivalents, and various barriers to Part 25
civilian certification of these machines that were designed and
built to Soviet Air Force standards, mean that we are unlikely to
see these large cargo lifters in the West with similar frequency.
Certainly, aircraft operated in Africa often are ill-maintained by
Northern Hemisphere standards. But there's nothing innately
unairworthy about the Antonov, which has flown many, many hours and
is still supported by its Ukrainian design bureau.
Local news reported that the mishap aircraft took off at 12:48PM
and crashed 12 minutes after takeoff into Bukalaza forest, and was
completely destroyed by the impact forces and post-crash fire.
Zakharov blamed the crash on fog and engine failure at 150-200
meters altitude. Zakharov, who has ten years experience flying in
tropical Africa, said that the crew had less than half a minute to
do everything right and avoid the crash.
To add one last macabre twist, Zakharov and the Russian embassy
in Kampala ran into difficulties trying to return the bodies of the
Russian airmen to their homeland. Regular scheduled airlines that
fly Kampala-Moscow did not want to take the six caskets on
board,leaving the Russians to try to charter a cargo plane to
return the remains of their countrymen to their bereaved
families.