The shipment of the aircraft is still unclear. According to initial reports, there will be paint on the board, along with computer parts, flowers and fruits. In the meantime, it is clear that more was on board, but the exact shipment is still unknown.
“When you hear that a cargo plane has crashed, you’ll think the government immediately wants to know what was on that plane,” says Joost Orangi, who has been searching for information about the disaster for years as an investigative journalist. “But that didn’t happen.” Jeron Plettenberg, who worked for El Al, asserts that these papers were not initially requested. Because of that, we’ll never be able to say for sure what exactly was on the plane. The shipment from the plane hadn’t gone through customs either.
Years after the disaster, health complaints came from local residents. In the end, it was found that the plane contained depleted uranium, along with raw materials for making sarin gas. This information emerged, in part through what was revealed by the newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
These discoveries caused such a stir that, six years after the disaster, in 1998, a commission of inquiry was finally formed. However, they were never able to find out the exact payload of the aircraft, in part because the Israeli government did not want to reveal this information.
