TIME MAGAZINE SEPT 18 1978

It was a genuine horror story, calculated to make the most alarming of Rhodesian doomsday prophecies seem true. As a blood-red sun was sinking behind the thorn trees on the Zambezi escarpment, a lumbering Air Rhodesia Viscount airliner took off from Kariba on a flight to Salisbury. Ten minutes later the pilot, John Hood, 36, reported that he had lost control of his starboard engines. "We're going in," he radioed. In a few moments, his craft crashed into the thick bushland of the Whamira Hills.

Of the 56 people on board, 38 died in the crash. Five of the 18 survivors struggled free and left immediately in search of water. Three of the remaining 13 were miraculously spared by hiding when, half an hour later, nine armed guerrilla soldiers arrived. "It's only because I know a terrorist when I see one that I'm still alive," recalled Anthony Hill, 39, an army reservist. He hid in the bush. At first the guerrillas, clad in jungle green uniforms, seemed friendly, promising help. But then they herded together the ten people at the wreckage, robbed them of their valuables, and finally cut them down with automatic weapons fire. From another hiding place, businessman Hans Hansen and his wife Diana could hear the victims crying, "Please don't shoot us!" as the firing began. Dazed by the ordeal, Hansen said later: "I'll never be able to get that moment out of my mind."

From his headquarters in neighboring Zambia, Joshua Nkomo, co-leader of the Patriotic Front guerrillas, denied that his troops had slain the ten survivors of the crash, but proudly boasted that his men had indeed shot down the plane. Such civilian craft, he claimed, were sometimes used by the Salisbury government for military missions. Rhodesian authorities at first denied that the plane had been shot down, but after four days of investigation confirmed that it had been hit by a heat-seeking missile, presumably an SA-7 of the kind the Soviet Union has been supplying the guerrillas.

The incident turned the tense mood of Salisbury uglier than ever. Middle-aged businessmen talked of taking up arms. A group of whites in a mixed Salisbury bar, fingering the triggers of rifles, ordered blacks who sat beside them to get out. The blacks did not tarry. Rumors circulated that two young whites, after hearing of the massacre, stopped their car and shot the first black man they saw. In Parliament, a backbencher called for martial law and general mobilization, and blustered that Africa was about to see "its first race of really angry white men." Almost certainly there would be acts of vengeance by the Rhodesian armed forces, probably in the form of retaliatory raids against guerrilla camps in Zambia and Mozambique. Even many whites who had begun to seem receptive to the idea of eventual black rule in Rhodesia wondered, after hearing Nkomo claim responsibility for the air crash in a BBC interview, wondered anew whether there could be a political agreement with him.