Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
The chute was spinning and then I blacked out
‘Scuppered’ wife tells of plunge
VIEWERS were wondering which planet Amanda Holden was on after she asked British astronaut Tim Peake: “When you went to the moon, did you take a piece of the moon?”
Major Peake, 45, replied: “I wasn’t on the moon, I was in the space station.” On ITV’S This Morning show, Amanda went on: “So you never got off... nothing floating about that you could steal?” She later tweeted: “We howled in the break. I’m a t*t.” THE wife of a soldier accused of trying to kill her by tampering with her parachute told how she fought to fix it as she plummeted 4,000ft.
Victoria Cilliers, 40, told police she tried to untwist the tangled chute “to get some sort of control over it... then it went black”.
In the filmed interview, shown in court yesterday, she told police she did not think the “one in a million” problems with the kit could have been accidental.
The army physio, who survived with broken bones after landing on a newly ploughed field, also told of husband Sergeant Emile Cilliers’s financial issues and how she had changed her will.
She told officers her marriage had become “a bit strained” after he returned from a 2014 ski trip.
Sgt Cilliers, 37, is accused of tampering with her main and reserve chutes before her jump at Netheravon Airfield, Wilts, and of tampering with a gas valve at their home in Amesbury days earlier in a bid to blow her up.
He denies attempted murder and criminal damage to endanger life. The trial continues at Winchester crown court.