UNITED NATIONS, March 11 (Xinhuanet) -- The United Nations is investigating how it came into possession of a flight recorder, which was reportedly from the downed aircraft of the presidents ofRwanda and Burundi, and is handing it over to an outside firm for an analysis of its contents, a UN spokesman said on Thursday.

    UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has instructed its in-house watchdog -- the Office of Internal Oversight Services -- to look into exactly what happened 10 years ago after a black box turned up in UN offices on Wednesday, spokesman Fred Eckhard told reporters.

    His announcement came after a recent article in the French newspaper Le Monde alleged that the UN was given the so-called "black box" from the Falcon aircraft that crashed on April 6, 1994 in Rwanda.

    The crash killed then presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprian Ntayamira of Burundi. Their deaths set off a chain of killings and massacres throughout Rwanda that year, with the deathtoll from the genocide mounting to more than 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis and "moderate" Hutu.

    Eckhard said that the UN traced the paper trail of a black box that was sent by diplomatic pouch from the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1994 through Nairobi, Kenya, to the UN headquarters in New York.

    That trail took officials to the Air Safety Unit of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, located in a building across the street from the main UN complex, where officials found a black box in a locked filing cabinet.

    "I say a black box, not the black box, because what we found was in pristine condition," Eckhard said. "In fact, when it was received in the Peacekeeping Department's Air Safety Unit 10 yearsago, the officials in charge at that time apparently concluded that it could not have been the black box because its pristine condition indicated that it had not been in a crash."

    Because of that judgment, he added, the Air Safety experts, after unsuccessfully trying to identify its source, put it in the file cabinet and did not report it up the chain of command.

    Eckhard stressed that none of the senior peacekeeping officialsof the time had any knowledge of it and that the first time they knew of its existence was Wednesday. "They then reported this to the Secretary-General's Office," he said.

    "The black box is now under lock and key in this building. We intend to immediately turn it over to a qualified outside body foranalysis of its contents," he said. Enditem ¡¡