I should not have survived that fall
Jury told it’s ‘inconceivable’ near fatal kit failure was an accident
THE wife of an Army sergeant accused of tampering with her parachute yesterday told a court her fall was “not a conceivable accident” and she “should not have survived”.
Victoria Cilliers was in shock after she found out the cause of the near-fatal jump on Easter Sunday, 2015. The Scot’s husband Emile is accused of her attempted murder by removing two slinks from her reserve parachute – vital parts which connect the harness with the lines.
In an interview shown in court, Victoria, 42, who was born in East Lothian, told police: “It’s not really a conceivable accident.
“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.
“Those slinks do not just disappear, even when wrongly assembled. I shouldn’t have survived that and that was a real shock which I was finding it pretty hard to deal with.”
Cilliers is accused of sabotaging the kit at the Army Parachute Association hangar toilets at Netheravon Airfield, Wiltshire. He allegedly twisted the lines of the main parachute and removed the slinks from the reserve.
Victoria said she’d been talking with friends for “five to 10 minutes” while her husband was with the parachute.
The physiotherapist told the court their marriage began to deteriorate in November 2014 when her husband went on a ski trip with the Army during which he stopped saying that he loved her.
Victoria said: “He came back very different and sat down and said he didn’t want to be in this marriage and ‘I think we got married too quickly’.”
She said she was “devastated” and became suspicious of Cilliers when he took a trip to Germany and also started sending “inappropriate messages” to other women.
Victoria told Winchester Crown Court that after the fall, her husband did not visit her often in hospital, where she’d had major surgery on leg and back injuries.
She added: “I said ‘I love you’ and he didn’t reply, which is harsh in that situation, really f ****** harsh.”
Cilliers, 37, of the Royal Army Physical Training Corps, denies two counts of attempted murder and a third charge of damaging a gas valve, recklessly endangering life. The trial continues.