U.N. Finds 1994 Rwanda Crash Black Box

UNITED NATIONS - In what Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) called a "first-class foul-up," the United Nations (news - web sites) said Thursday it has discovered a black box sent from Rwanda after a 1994 plane crash that unleashed a genocide in the east African nation.


The device was found Wednesday in a locked filing cabinet in the U.N. Peacekeeping Department's Air Safety Unit. Aviation experts put it there apparently in the belief its "pristine condition" ruled out the possibility that it came from the downed Falcon 50 jet, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said.


The United Nations now intends to immediately send the black box — technically known as a flight data recorder — to "a qualified outside body for analysis of its contents" to determine whether it came from the plane that was carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, Eckhard said.


"On the face of it, there's no reason that we would think that that judgment made by those experts 10 years ago was faulty judgment, but to make sure we're going to send it out for analysis," he said.

more: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040312/ap_on_re_af/un_rwanda_probe_5

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