Guard implicated in Garuda crash
JAKARTA (JP): Despite a large-scale search involving hundreds of Armed Forces (ABRI) personnel, civilian volunteers and experts, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder of the ill-fated Garuda Indonesia Airbus remain missing.
The local search workers, a team from the Airbus Industries that manufactured the aircraft, along with those from the British Aircraft Accident Investigation Branch, have been combing an increasingly larger area from the site where the aircraft crashed on Sept. 26 in Buah Nabar village in Sibolangit, Medan, North Sumatra.
So far, Antara reported yesterday, the workers could only find the handle of the recorders, known as the black box.
Hope now rests on the use of heavy equipment to lift some of the heavy wreckage of the plane to further search for the recorders.
"We need heavy equipment like excavators to lift the plane wreckage, but it will not arrive here until next week," said Santosa Sayoga, a Ministry of Transportation official.
"We have drawn up a map of the site and dug in places where we thought the black box could possibly be buried. It is possible, however, that the black box broke," Santosa said.
Santosa also said the metal detector device sent from England to help search for the black box could not be used because the ground surrounding the crash site had dried up. The equipment can function effectively only if the black box is submerged in water or in mud, he said.
The Airbus A-300-B4 plane, servicing the Jakarta-Medan route, crashed and exploded into pieces near Buah Nabar village, in Sibolangit district, minutes before it was due to land at Polonia Airport, Medan on Sept. 26.
It was carrying 208 Indonesian passengers, 14 foreigners and 12 crew members, who were all killed in the crash.
Medan police officially detained 32 people from the crash site for allegedly looting items from crash victims.
A civilian defense unit member, known as hansip, said he was very shocked upon receiving a police notification stating his negligence over the cause of the crash.
Bukti Purba, 39, whose duty is to patrol his neighborhood in Sembahe village, near the crash site, said he could not understand why police summoned him to the North Sumatra Police Headquarters Thursday for questioning.
In the letter of summons, signed by the head of North Sumatra's Police Detective Chief Col. Edi Darnadi, police said Purba would be questioned as a suspect/witness in a criminal case "because his negligence caused the Garuda-152 to crash and kill all people on board".
"I had nothing to do with the plane. I am not a pilot. When the plane crashed I was relaxing in a coffee shop six kilometers from the location," Purba told Antara.
Purba said he obeyed his village chief who suggested he defy the police summons.
Sembahe villagers testified that Purba should instead receive an award from the police because he volunteered to evacuate the victims.
North Sumatra Police spokesman Lt. Col. Amrin Karim, however, said Purba's status was only as a witness. "He is not a suspect, merely a witness," he told The Jakarta Post.
President Soeharto has asked the public not to draw their own conclusions into the cause of the crash and wait for the findings of the ongoing official investigation, which might take several months to complete. (21/prb)