Skydiver’s husband a suspect in ‘accident’
THE wife of a South African-born army sergeant accused of sabotaging her parachute told British police her husband barely visited her in hospital, after she survived a 1 200m fall.
Victoria Cilliers told police in a video interview, shown to the Winchester Crown Court in the UK, that he also refused to tell her he loved her as she recovered from major surgery.
Cilliers’s husband, Emile, has been charged with attempted murder after her main and reserve parachutes failed.
This is the second attempted murder charge he is facing. The first relates to an incident where he allegedly caused a gas leak in the couple’s house to blow up his wife.
In the interview, Cilliers also said she believed her fall was not a mistake.
She said in the interview: “You can’t categorically say it was not an accident; you can’t categorically say it was but never, in the history of parachuting worldwide, has it happened.”
Emile is accused of tampering with Cilliers’s parachutes after he took them to the hangar toilets, where he allegedly twisted the lines of the main chute and took the slinks off the reserve.
On Thursday, in a police interview played to the jury, Cilliers told of the frantic moments on Easter Sunday 2015 when she realised after leaving the plane that something was wrong with her parachute.
The skilled skydiver said the parachute canopy was twisted. “I can’t remember if I pulled the reserve or it deployed automatically. I could feel the reserve fly and again straight away I felt something wasn’t right and it was very twisted.
“The last thing I remember is trying to get some kind of control over it, then everything went black,” Cilliers said.
She survived the fall, landing in a ploughed field, but suffered a broken pelvis, broken ribs and fractured vertebrae.