Officials Find Missing Black Box

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says he's "incredulous." How a cockpit recorder from the 1994 crash that killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi got lost is, in his words, "a real foul-up, a first-class foul-up."

The black box -- initial reports don't say whether it's a cockpit voice or data recorder -- is an integral part of the investigation into the 1994 shoot-down of the presidents' Falcon-50 near the Kigali Airport.

Both Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, died on April 6, 1994, when the aircraft was hit by two ground-to-air missiles as it approached the airport. The crash was the flash point for 100 days of genocide, which claimed the lives of more than 800,000 Tutsi tribal members and moderate Hutus (both presidents were Hutus).

So where was the recorder? Apparently, it was locked inside a file cabinet drawer. And it had been for almost a decade. A spokesman for the Secretary General said, ironically, when the black box was received by air safety officials at the UN, it was in such good shape that they believed it couldn't possibly have been involved in a crash, much less a shoot-down.

FMI: www.un.org