The second shooting down , on 12 February 1979 , killed all 59 on board . The real target of the second attack was General Peter Walls , head of the COMOPS ( Commander , Combined Operations ) , in charge of the Special Forces , including the SAS and the Selous Scouts . Due to the large number of tourists returning to Salisbury a second flight had been dispatched . General Walls received a boarding card for the second flight , which departed Kariba 15 minutes after the doomed aircraft . No one has been brought to trial or charged with shooting down the aircraft due to amnesty laws passed by both Smith and Mugabe . In a television interview not long after the attack on the first aircraft , Nkomo joked about the incident while admitting ZAPU had indeed been responsible . In his memoirs , '' Story of My Life '' , published in 1985 , Nkomo later said , " during that interview , the interviewee had asked about what we used to down the planes and I said stones , jokingly in an attempt to avoid answering the question due to military intelligence which demanded secrecy regarding what type of weapons we had acquired from the Soviet Union . They remembered the laugh and not the regret for the shooting down of both aircraft . " Nkomo founded the National Democratic Party ( NDP ) and in 1960 , the year British prime minister Harold Macmillan spoke of the " Wind of Change " blowing through Africa , Robert Mugabe joined him . The NDP was banned by the white minority government and it was subsequently replaced by the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union ( ZAPU ) , also founded by Nkomo , in 1962 , itself immediately banned . ZAPU split in 1963 and while some have claimed this split was due to ethnic tensions , more accurately the split was motivated by the failure of Sithole , Mugabe , Takawira and Malianga to wrest control of ZAPU from Nkomo . ZAPU would remain a multi-ethnic party right up until independence
second shooting down
Air Rhodesia Flight 827
Joshua Nkomo