Soviet Crewman in Crash Killing Machel Visited by Wife, Envoy

A Soviet diplomat Wednesday visited a Soviet crew member injured in the plane crash that killed Mozambique’s President Samora M. Machel, the South African Foreign Ministry said.

Staunchly anti-Communist South Africa, which has no relations with the Soviet Union, allowed the diplomat and Nadejna Novosselov, the wife of flight engineer Vladimir Novosselov, to make the trip from Maputo, capital of neighboring Mozambique.

Novosselov, who suffered a badly broken leg and head injuries, was transferred from a hospital near the crash site just inside the South African border to a hospital in Pretoria.

Novosselov was among 10 survivors of the crash Sunday night that killed Machel and 33 others, including several senior officials of Mozambique’s Marxist government.

Novosselov originally was identified as the pilot, but an official Mozambican list of survivors said he was the flight engineer and that the Soviet pilot, co-pilot and two other engineers were killed.

Joining Nadejna Novosselov at the hospital was Nikolai Karpenko, second secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Maputo, the South African Foreign Ministry reported. The ministry said they will stay in South Africa until Novosselov recovers.

Neither Mozambique nor South Africa has commented officially on what caused the Soviet Tupolev 134 jet to crash in a remote, hilly region a few hundred yards inside South Africa.

Newspapers in Johannesburg said that bad weather and pilot error probably caused the crash. Business Day quoted unidentified Mozambican aviation sources as indicating the pilot apparently mistook the lights of a border town for those of Maputo.

Anti-apartheid groups and others, including Zambian President Kenneth D. Kaunda, have accused South Africa of somehow being responsible.