The black box recordings indicated that the crew tried to level the An-12 and turn it towards Menongue's airport for an emergency landing; however, 47 seconds after the missile detonated, the port wing exploded and separated from the aircraft. The burning aircraft then crashed in a field about away from Menongue, with the main part of the widespread wreckage landing in close proximity to the Menongue-Cuito Cuanavale road. The next day, several officers from the Soviet Military Mission in Menongue, accompanied by Cuban and Angolan troops, arrived at the crash site where they found all 21 bodies – the crew of 8 and 13 passengers – at the scene. The human remains were first transported to Menongue for identification and later to Luanda. Coffins containing the remains of the Soviet crew and passengers were then transported to the Soviet Union. Civilians from local villages and members of the local people's defense organization (ODP – Organização de Defesa Popular), who had witnessed the midair explosion and the crash, said they had heard and seen what they believed to be a surface-to-air missile being launched immediately before the accident. They described the sound and fume trails that originated from the ground to the point of impact in midair. The recordings of the An-12BP crew's air traffic conversation with Menongue air-defense radar operators were obtained by Angolan authorities. These were later passed on to Soviet investigators conducting their own probe into the crash. The recordings revealed that the crew had reported a missile explosion on the aircraft's port side. In the Soviet Union a specially designated commission under the direct supervision of the Chief of the Air Military Transportation Command of the Soviet Armed Forces was created to establish the cause of the crash. The commission's examination of parts of the aircraft's fuselage revealed multiple traces of an explosive matter and fragments from the surface-to-air missile. In his book "Journey Without Boundaries", SADF Colonel André Diedericks, a former South African Special Forces officer, claims that he was the person who gave the order to launch the missile that brought down the An-12. During the early summer of 1985 one of the previously captured Strela-l (SA-9) systems, manned and operated by a South African Recce group under the command of then-Captain Diedericks, crossed into the Cuando Cubango province, Angola, and with UNITA's help, protection and escort was secretly deployed around the Menongue area.