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.

FMI: www.caa.co.ug