NAIROBI, 9 August 2005 — A team of US aviation experts has arrived in Kenya and will soon travel to Sudan to assist in the probe of last month’s helicopter crash that killed Sudanese Vice President John Garang, the US Embassy here said yesterday.
The five-strong team from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) arrived in Nairobi on Sunday and is expected to depart shortly to join the investigation being conducted jointly by the Sudanese government and Garang’s ex-rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), it said.
“The group is here, they arrived on Sunday, but they haven’t worked out a final schedule yet,” an embassy official told AFP.
“They will be investigating the crash as the NTSB does and has done in other incidents like this.” The team is headed by senior investigator Dennis Jones, who has participated in accident investigations in Sudan twice before, the Washington-based NTSB said, adding that its findings would be made public by Sudanese officials.
“All information on the progress of the investigation will be released by (Sudan’s) Government of National Unity,” it said in a statement issued last week.
Garang and 13 others were killed in a helicopter crash on July 30.
Khartoum, the SPLM, Garang’s widow and foreign diplomats have all said the crash was an accident due most likely to poor weather and visibility and possible pilot error. But on Friday, Museveni said the cause was unclear and could have been the result of “an external factor,” suggesting for the first time that the crash might have been due to foul play.
Meanwhile, Salva Kiir, the successor to the late southern Sudanese leader, is to be sworn at a brief ceremony in Khartoum on Thursday, the official SUNA new agency reported yesterday.
Earlier reports had said that Kiir, who replaced Garang as head of the former southern rebel Sudan People Liberation’s Movement Army (SPLM A) following his death in the crash, would take up his new post on Tuesday.
