DAKAR - Drugshandelaars hebben eerder deze maand een niet nader geïdentificeerde Boeing gebruikt om hun verboden waar van Zuid-Amerika naar Afrika te vervoeren. Het is voor zover bekend de eerste keer dat zo'n groot vliegtuig voor dergelijke praktijken is gebruikt, meldde een regionale functionaris van de VN-organisatie tegen misdaad en drugs (UNODC) maandag (16 november).
Volgens de in Senegal gevestigde functionaris, Alexandre Schmidt, is de Boeing eerder deze maand in Mali geland met een grote partij cocaïne uit Venezuela. Hoeveel er precies in het toestel zat, is onbekend. Maar dit type Boeing kan volgens Schmidt maximaal 10 ton coke vervoeren.
Het toestel is neergestort, kort nadat het weer was opgestegen voor de terugvlucht. De drugs waren toen al uitgeladen. De internationale politieorganisatie Interpol voert een onderzoek uit.
Het is niet bekend welk type toestel het betreft. Ook de eigenaar van het toestel is niet bekend.
Deze kist was geland op een zelfgemaakt landingsbaan. Hoogstwaarschijnlijk een 737-200 of een 727. We zullen het rapport moeten afwachten. Ben toch wel erg benieuwd naar dit hele gebeuren.
Hoe kan het in vredesnaam dat men n kist 'mist' en vervolgens verdenkt van allerlei ongein .... (beetje verdacht)
Jammer van die kist maar wie weet komen ze dan ook n keer naar NL; die 737-200 en 727 komen hier veel te weinig
ja dat is weer iets anders dan wat ik tegen kom als ik bezig ben
op schiphol. 10 ton haal ik niet zo gauw van een vliegtuig, blijft
hoogt uit bij een paar kilo.
maar idd blijft het raar dat ze hem niet eerder in de peiling kregen,
echter is het ook niet zo raar als je bedenkt dat ze daar niet de
meest up-to-date radar zullen hebben als de meeste westerse landen
Het volgende verhaal lijkt er ook wel een beetje op. Het vreemde ervan is dat de B727 en de piloot ervan nog steeds niet teruggevonden is. Het verhaal van de verdwijning van N844AA in Angola:
Boeing 727 has disappeared from Angola. Was it insurance fraud? Has a cartel of diamond smugglers got it? Or could it be in the hands of al-Qaeda? William Langley reports.
The old Boeing had done its duty well. It had served 26 loyal years in the colours of American Airlines, but its best days were long gone, and as the sun rose over West Africa on May 25 this year it sat forlornly on the greasy concrete apron of Luanda International Airport in Angola, apparently leased to Air Angola.
It hadn't flown for 14 months, and its sorry state seemed to tell a familiar story about African airports - unpaid bills, dodgy paperwork, token maintenance. Nevertheless, no one paid it much attention. But the 727 was about to become the centrepiece of one of the strangest mysteries in aviation history, one that would alarm Western governments and baffle investigators around the world.
There are only a few places where a 46.5 metre-long, 90,718 kilogram commercial airliner can take off without warning and simply disappear. Africa is one of them, and whoever was at the controls of the Boeing 727 - registration number N844AA - on the afternoon of May 25 must have known the possibilities of what pilots call the "gauntlet" - the vast, virtually uncontrolled airspace south of the Sahara Desert and north of the Limpopo River. For, at around teatime, the plane suddenly fired up its engines, rumbled down the runway, soared into the velvety dusk and vanished.
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"In 22 years in this business, I've never come across anything like this," says Chris Yates, a security analyst for Jane's Aviation Service. "Even for Africa it's astounding." But who took the 727? Terrorists? Criminals? Joyriders?
From the moment the plane's disappearance was disclosed, the CIA and the secretive National Security Agency in the United States have been urgently trying to find out. British, French and Russian intelligence services have been co-opted into the search. Spy satellites have swept all potential landing places within the plane's range. Western diplomats throughout Africa have been ordered to keep their ears to the ground, and thousands of hours of air-traffic communications have been analysed in the search for clues.
Unconfirmed reports have come in of the plane making a clandestine landing in Nigeria, crashing off the Seychelles, and being seen, with a hasty new paint job, flying between Guinea and the Lebanon.
"Basically," says Phil Reeker, a spokesman for the US State Department, "we don't know where it is. But we really need to find out. This is a serious matter."
Underlining these fears was an updated advisory notice, issued by the US Homeland Security Department the month the plane went missing, saying that the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation had a "continuing fixation" with using large commercial aircraft for attacks. And that following the plane's purchase from American Airlines in late 2001, it was converted into a flying fuel-tanker. "It doesn't take a genius," says Yates, "to figure out that if you filled it up and stuck a couple of suicide pilots on board, you'd have a huge bomb."
Many threads remain to be unravelled in the mystery of the lost Boeing. Some may, indeed, lead back to al-Qaeda, and others, perhaps, to the culture of what passes for Angola's Civil Aviation Authority. But one thread seems clearly to lead to the brash figure of Ben Padilla, a 51-year-old "cowboy" cargo pilot who went missing, from his home in Miami, Florida, about the same time as the plane.
Padilla is a minor legend in the murky realms of Third World aviation, someone known as the man to turn to for difficult missions. A pilot, engineer, navigator and mechanic, he is, says a former colleague, "a guy who'll do anything. He sorts out the money problems, cuts through the paperwork, and brings your plane home."
His sister, Benita, says he is a "John Wayne type - intimidating. Like he's bulletproof". He is not, though, according to the US Federal Aviation Authority, certified to fly 727s. Nor is he given to vanishing acts.
Padilla arrived in Angola two months before the Boeing's disappearance. He knew who to look for. Helder Preza, director of the Angolan CAA, recalls Padilla telling him that he had come to take possession of the Boeing on behalf of its owners. "We told him that was no problem," says Preza, "as long as the fees owing on it were met." Padilla apparently promised to organise the money - $US50,000 ($76,000) - and, in the meantime, was allowed to do maintenance work on the plane.
Ascertaining the true ownership of aircraft - especially those in Africa - can be difficult. The FAA's database shows that after being "retired" by American Airlines in late 2001, the Boeing was bought by a Miami-based company called Aerospace Sales and Leasing for slightly less than $US1 million. But ASL appears to have no listed telephone number or corporate address and US press reports say the man who owns it, Maury Joseph, was barred from running a publicly traded company after being convicted in 1997 of defrauding investors.
Joseph will not speak about the Luanda episode, or anything else, but his son Lance, a Miami lawyer, says the 727 was leased to Air Angola - the country's ramshackle flag-carrier - which appears to be ultimately owned by the Angolan Army. The plane was converted to carry bulk fuel in sealed tanks to mining outposts in the country's remote interior.
But, says Lance, soon after entering the agreement Air Angola failed to keep up the payments. The plane ran up further bills sitting on the ground in Luanda, and ASL was trying to negotiate its repossession when it vanished. Lance says he "doesn't recall" the name of Ben Padilla and has no idea where the Boeing is now.
On the day it flew away the 727 took on 53,000 litres of jet fuel - enough to give it a range of about 2400 kilometres. Airport officials say two men - one of them thought to be Padilla - boarded the aircraft before the refuelling, and that at about 5pm the plane's three engines were started. In fading light, the aircraft suddenly taxied down the runway, spun around and took off. The men in the cockpit made no radio contact, and the plane's transponder, which allows it to be more easily tracked by radar, was switched off.
Luanda Airport - one of the world's more dilapidated - has enough trouble dealing with its daily handful of authorised flights. No system was in place to prevent an unauthorised one.
"The plane would have been lost within minutes," says Richard Cornwell, a senior researcher at the South African Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. "Basically, once you go north of South Africa there is no air-traffic control until you reach the Mediterranean coast. Radar over most of Africa is non-existent. This aircraft could have gone anywhere."
Early media reports say the plane finally broke radio silence far out over the Indian Ocean, to request landing permission in the Seychelles - more than 3200 kilometres from Luanda. Seychelles officials deny they ever heard from N844AA, and certainly the plane did not arrive.
To have even reached the vicinity of the holiday islands it would have needed to be refuelled somewhere on the African mainland - and no country admits having received it. Almost six weeks after the 727's disappearance an intriguing report surfaced of it having been spotted on the ground in Conakry, the capital of Guinea. Bob Strother, a Canadian pilot, says it appeared to have been given a hasty respray and a new Guinean registration number. "There's absolutely no doubt it's the same aircraft," Strother told a newspaper. "The old registration is clearly visible."
The Boeing was said to be in the hands of "a member of West Africa's Lebanese business community" who was using it to run goods between Conakry and Beirut. There is no doubt that the Lebanese diaspora in West Africa - which controls the diamond trade and much else - includes a number of canny and redoubtable operators. But would one go to the lengths of stealing a commercial jet at a time of extreme anti-terrorist security?
Before the question could be answered the plane vanished again. It has not returned to Guinea, and the US State Department says it is treating Strother's report "with caution". Reeker says, "Our position is that this aircraft remains unaccounted for."
So where is the plane? And where is Padilla? The missing pilot's brother Joe, speaking from his home in Pensacola, Florida, fears the worst. "The family has heard nothing," says Joe Padilla.
"Not since before he went to Angola. My understanding is that it was a legitimate mission. His job was to repossess the plane, make it airworthy and bring it out of there. My feeling is something bad happened while he was getting ready to leave. Someone forced him to do something against his will.
"Ben's an adventurer, and a great airman. He's worked in all the crazy places - Paraguay, Mozambique, the Philippines; the places other guys don't want to work. But he's not a criminal and he's certainly not a terrorist.
"The fact he hasn't been in touch tells me he is probably dead. I don't know how. Maybe the people who forced him to take off killed him later. Maybe if the plane wasn't fully ready to fly, it crashed somewhere. It's all a big mystery."
And so it may remain. The State Department says there is "no reason" to believe the Boeing has been taken by terrorists. But the apparent ease with which a purpose-built flying bomb can vanish is a sobering reminder of the kind of opportunity available to an outfit like al-Qaeda.
"African aviation is another world,' says Chris Yates. "Anything can happen there. And now it has."
phantom wrote:Het volgende verhaal lijkt er ook wel een beetje op. Het vreemde ervan is dat de B727 en de piloot ervan nog steeds niet teruggevonden is.
....
"African aviation is another world,' says Chris Yates. "Anything can happen there. And now it has."
Ooit wel eens de film ´Lord of War´ gezien? Van die An-12 zal ook nooit meer iets zijn gevonden.....
phantom wrote:Het volgende verhaal lijkt er ook wel een beetje op. Het vreemde ervan is dat de B727 en de piloot ervan nog steeds niet teruggevonden is.
"African aviation is another world,' says Chris Yates. "Anything can happen there. And now it has."
Ooit wel eens de film ´Lord of War´ gezien? Van die An-12 zal ook nooit meer iets zijn gevonden.....
Uiteraard.... ik wilde niet zeggen dat die specifieke An-12 die ze voor de film hebben gebruikt zo is geëindigd... Ik wilde alleen het voorbeeld aanhalen van wat er mogelijk ook nog kan gebeuren. Het is een film en die An-12 is dus niet echt op die weg gesloopt, maar het zou mij echt helemaal niets verbazen als zoiets wel eens in het echt gebeurd is!
Steeds meer info komt binnen. Het gaat om een B727 volgens officials. Nu nog een nummertje !!
BAMAKO — Authorities in Mali arrested three people for dismantling the wreck of a plane thought to have been used to smuggle cocaine from Venezuela, a Malian source close to the inquiry said Sunday.
"Three people of Malian nationality, who were dismantling the wreckage of a Boeing 727 have been arrested and transferred by plane to Bamako," the source told AFP, following their arrest in the Gao area in the northeast of the country.
Authorities are now investigating whether they were trying to destroy evidence, the source said.
Earlier this month a UN official said the Boeing 727 landed on a makeshift strip and unloaded a cargo of illegal drugs before crashing as it tried to take off.
A Malian official on Sunday cast doubt on the crash theory, saying he thought the smugglers simply destroyed the plane after completing their delivery.
"I saw the burnt-out wreck of the plane more than 200 kilometres north of Gao. It's a Boeing 727. It's not certain from the position of the aircraft that it crashed as it was trying to take off," the official said.
"I think they had no intention of taking off there. They came for a mission and once the mission was complete they burned the aircraft, and that was that."
On November 16 Alexandre Schmidt of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told journalists in Dakar the plane was transporting drugs from Venezuela to west Africa.
But Caracas questioned the evidence linking it to Venezuela and said US media were manipulating information to detract from Venezuela's anti-drug policies.
In recent years west Africa has become an important transit point for South American cocaine being smuggled to European markets and according to Schmidt there are also signs that the region is now moving into producing drugs.
Het nummertje van de B727 zou zijn: J5-GCU
Deze registratie niet verwarren met B707 J5-GGU die nu in Mombasa zou staan met landing gear damage.
Het vreemde alleen dat er geen 727 met deze regie is terug te vinden waar dan ook, slechts 1 sighting van deze regie is gerapporteerd op de luchthaven van Fortaleza Pinto Martins Intl: http://web1.jetphotos.net/logbook/showl ... rch=J5-GCU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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Dit heeft een aardig hoog A-Team gehalte 
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Uiteraard.... ik wilde niet zeggen dat die specifieke An-12 die ze voor de film hebben gebruikt zo is geëindigd... Ik wilde alleen het voorbeeld aanhalen van wat er mogelijk ook nog kan gebeuren. Het is een film en die An-12 is dus niet echt op die weg gesloopt, maar het zou mij echt helemaal niets verbazen als zoiets wel eens in het echt gebeurd is!