No black box link to African crash
From Correspondent Richard Roth at the United Nations
UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- Early analysis of the 30-minute tape recording in an airplane "black box" sent to the United Nations from Africa 10 years ago fails to draw a connection to the plane crash that killed the Rwandan and Burundian presidents.
The plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart Cyprian Ntayamira on April 6, 1994 was thought to be shot down.
The incident helped trigger the Rwandan genocide in which at least 800,000 people perished.
After ridiculing the idea of a "black box"' on U.N. premises, the United Nations last week was forced to step back, admitting a box -- actually orange in color -- had indeed been located in a file cabinet.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the affair "a first-class foul-up" and a U.N. spokesman Wednesday said the cockpit voice recorder tapes heard by the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington contain some conversations in French.
There is no proof that the box currently being listened to in Washington matches the black box from an actual crash. The box was shown to the media this afternoon in U.N. headquarters.
A former U.N. official who was aware of the box in 1994 told CNN "it's a non-story," believing the box is actually not from the crash.
The official, Denis Beissel, said somebody walked into the U.N. air safety office in the Rwandan capital of Kigali three months after the crash with the box.
It was then forwarded to the United Nations in New York.
The former U.N. official said the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board examined the box in 1994 and told the United Nations it had found nothing on the tape linked to the presidential plane crash.
The United Nations said the NTSB and international civil aviation authorities are still examining the tape and there is no timetable for a definitive answer on the black box contents.
After the unprecedented deaths of the two African leaders 10 years ago, killings and massacres followed throughout Rwanda that year, with the death toll from the genocide mounting to more than 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutu.
