search to be concentrated too close to Mauritius. The United States Navy sent aircraft from Diego Garcia, which were used to conduct immediate search and rescue operations in conjunction with the French Navy. By the time the first surface debris was located twelve hours after impact, it had drifted considerably from the impact location. Oil slicks and eight bodies showing signs of extreme trauma appeared in the water. There were no survivors. After recovery of the wreckage from below the surface of the ocean, the aircraft's fuselage and cabin interior were partly reassembled in one of SAA's hangars at Jan Smuts Airport, where it was examined and finally opened for viewing to the airline's staff and selected members of the public. Investigation Rennie Van Zyl, South Africa's head crash investigator, examined three wristwatches from baggage recovered from the surface; two of the watches were still running according to Taiwan time. Van Zyl deduced the approximate time of impact at 00:07:00, around three minutes after the last communication with air traffic control. Immediately after the crash, the press and public opinion suspected that terrorism brought down Flight 295. South Africa, then under the control of the apartheid government, was the target of terrorism both domestically and internationally, and offices for SAA, the country's flag carrier, had previously been attacked. Experts searched for indicators of an explosion on the initial pieces of wreckage discovered, such as surface pitting, impact cavities and spatter cavities caused by white-hot fragments from explosive devices that strike and melt metal alloys found in aircraft structures. Experts found none of this evidence. The investigators drew blood samples from two of the recovered bodies and found that the bodies had soot in their tracheae, indicating that at least two had died from smoke inhalation before the aircraft had crashed, and concluded that some of the passengers would have already lost their lives even if the pilots had successfully reached the airport. South Africa mounted an underwater search, named 'Operation Resolve', to try to locate the wreckage. The underwater locator beacons (ULBs) attached to the flight recorders were not designed for deep ocean use; nevertheless, a two-month-long sonar search for them was carried out before the effort was abandoned on 8 January 1988 when the ULBs were known to have stopped transmitting (at the time a ULB had to generate sonic pulses for thirty days). Steadfast Oceaneering, a specialist deep-ocean