GUARDING THE DEAD

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 852, 21 December 1929, Page 11

GUARDING THE DEAD

TUNIS AIR TRAGEDY BODIES BORNE FROM HILLS LONDON, Thursday. The bodies of the pilots, SquadronLea,der A. G. Jones-Williams and Flight-Lieutenant N. H. Jenkins, whose monoplane crashed among the hills in North Africa while on an attempted non-stop flight to Capetown, were brought to Tunis this afternoon by a military airplane. French soldiers stood on guard all night by the bodies. In bringing the bodies in they had at times to be lowered by ropes in order to traverse the narrow and rocky paths, at other times they were swung on rough cradles on the shoulders of gigantic Sudanese riflemen. “The Times” says there is still no connected report of the disaster near Tunis to the Royal Air Force monoplane. The local French officials think the airmen lost their way in the storm and were making for one of the few patches of open ground when the machine was sucked down by a mountain current, and ran into the side of Ejeb Elvit Mountain, 2,500 feet high. A lonely horseman saw the wreckage at dawn. He thought the airmen might still be alive, and tried to extricate them, but saw they were dead. A. preliminary commission of inquiry found that the watch from the instrument-board had stopped at 9.4 p.m.