SPAIN: Senior officers in the Spanish army cut corners to save €6,000 hiring a plane . . . at a cost of 62 lives. Jane Walker reports from Madrid
It was the worst military tragedy in Spanish peacetime history when 62 members of the armed forces died on May 26th last when their Ukranian-registered Yakolov-42 crashed into a mountainside near the town of Macka, in Trebzon in Turkey.
The officers and men were returning from a four-month peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, but their families allege that the plane was unsafe and that the identification of the bodies was rushed and flawed. Yesterday they were proved correct.
The Socialist government, which took office six months ago, listened and vowed to investigate their complaints.
At the beginning of this week, the defence minister Mr Jose Bono paid an unannounced visit to the army headquarters and personally removed dozens of files with information on the accident, the events leading up to it, and those which followed.
His findings made for distressing listening, particularly for the 30 relatives sitting in the visitors' gallery yesterday when the Cortes (Spanish parliament) heard shocking evidence from Mr Bono.
"That plane should never have been in the air," he told the chamber. He said it had two major faults, of which at least one rendered it unfit to fly, and the crew, who were inexperienced, had been flying for 23½ hours without a break. In addition, he added, the airport at Trebzon, where the plane was trying to land, lacked modern radar equipment for night- time landings, particularly in the atrocious weather conditions of that May night.
"That plane came close to crashing when it circled the airfield on the first attempt at landing," he said.
During a heated and angry debate in the chamber, Mr Bono accused the military authorities of ignoring complaints from officers who had flown on two previous flights in February and an earlier one in May last year.
Sixteen of them had made their complaints official, but many others had complained to colleagues and families - some illustrated with photographs - that the planes were too old and in a shocking condition, with seats not attached to the floor and heavy freight loose in the cabin alongside passengers.
Mr Bono told deputies that one month before that fateful night, the military general staff decided to change the plane because it was cheaper. "You closed your eyes to the faults in that plane, just to save €6,000," he accused the former defence minister.
Although the original chartering agent was the NATO agent Namsa, no fewer than four intermediary agents, all charging inflated commissions, had been involved. A Russian Tupolov 154 was originally chartered for the mission at a cost of €155,000. This was more suited to the journey as it was capable of flying non-stop from Kabul to Madrid.
The fatal Yak-42 cost €149,000, or €1,241 per passenger, and needed two refuelling stops en route. It was on the second of these that it crashed.
The Spanish airline, Air Europa, who have now been contracted for military transport whenever military planes are unsuitable, charge less than a €1,000 per passenger.
More distressing was what Mr Bono described as "indecent haste and lack of respect for the truth and for the families" in the identification of the bodies.
The first Spanish officials arrived in Turkey hours after the crash to help with identification of the badly mutilated remains.
Two days later, on May 28th, after two generals had arrived on the scene, they were told they had to be ready to fly them to Madrid for a full military funeral attended by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia that same day.
By then the identification process was still incomplete and dental records and DNA samples had not been used. The Turkish forensic institute in Istanbul had managed to identify 30 bodies and handed them over to the Spaniards. These identifications have all been proved to have been correct.
But the Spanish forensic institute received bags containing the remains of the remaining 32 victims and were given only 3½ hours to put names to them. Every one of these identifications has been shown to be wrong.
"Some of those bodies were wearing wedding rings, with names, initials and dates engraved on them, but no one bothered to compare them with the names of the victims," said Mr Bono.
Many of the families are waiting for a judge to authorise the exhumation of these remains so they can bury their own son or husband in the correct grave.
For some this will bring closure, but in other cases, where the bodies were cremated, they will only receive an urn to bury.
Some 30 of the relatives attended the heated debate yesterday. They kept quiet through most of the session, but were later removed from the chamber when they shouted insults at the former defence minister, Mr Federico Trillo, who sat stony faced as he listened to the accusations against him.
He denied any responsibility for the tragedy and claimed he had been given no information on the flights, on the aircraft being used and knew nothing about any complaints.
He said he would not resign his parliamentary seat: "No one can take the blame for something for which they are not guilty."