AIR-LINE MYSTERY

Southland Times, Issue 25342, 22 July 1935, Page 11

AIR-LINE MYSTERY

SECRET OF THE JUNGLE SOLVED. After four days of exhaustive search a grim secret was found hidden in the depths of an African jungle recently. It solved the mystery of what had become of a French air liner and its occupants, M. Edouard Renard, Governor of French Equatorial Africa, his beautiful actress wife and five friends. The wreckage of the machine and the dead bodies of the seven people were found lying among the debris of jungle trees, and plants near the outpost of Mossaka, in the Belgian Congo. M. Renard and his party took off from Brazzaville to fly 400 miles to Coquilhatville, and three hours later their pilot broadcast the warning that he was fighting a tornado and heavy fog. That was the last call received from the machine. When it failed to turn up aeroplanes containing observers flew over the jungle, which was searched by tracking parties. The tragedy was revealed when M. Gillard, the pilot of on? machine, saw strange marks on the forest near Mossaka, which caused him to land.

Reporting on the discovery, he stated the air liner was splintered and must have struck the ground at great speed. All the occupants were killed at once. Fog and lack of visibility following a tornado caused the disaster. "Tiie aeroplane,” he stated, “dived into swampy forest land at a point between Mossaka and Bolobo and near the junction of the Youmbi and Congo.rivers. Here the Congo is studded with hundreds of tiny islets covered with long grass and thick forest in which it was impossible to land.” M. Renard and his wife were well-known figures in the political and social life of Paris.