Accused ‘asked NO questions’ about wife’s parachute fall
AN Army sergeant accused of trying to murder his wife by sabotaging her parachute did not ask a single question about what caused her horrific 4,000ft fall at a meeting the following day, a court heard yesterday.
Mark Bayada, who is in charge at Netheravon airfield, Wiltshire, where Victoria Cilliers suffered severe injuries, met her husband Emile to explain the investigation.
The former Army sergeant major told Winchester Crown Court yesterday he had expected Cilliers, 38, to question him on what had happened. But he said he was stunned when Cilliers did not ask him anything.
Jurors heard Mr Bayada had been given permission by the British Parachute Association to inspect Mrs Cilliers’s main and reserve canopies, when he found vital links had been removed.
He said: ‘I never like meetings with people after incidents because they’re very emotive. I was apprehensive. It was club equipment. We should be the ones to ensure it is in good condition.
‘I was expecting questions, particularly from Emile. If someone told me a reserve parachute had failed, I would want to know why.
‘I told them the parachute had failed because it was not attached properly to the risers. Emile had little reaction.
‘He was looking at the ground with hardly any response at all. He did not ask me questions. I did expect them. They never came.’ Mr Bayada said he had never seen a tangled main parachute as bad as Mrs Cilliers’s. He added: ‘I believed the slinks were not present when the reserve parachute was deployed.
‘There was not structural damage within the canopy, no damage to the lines and no wear on the lines at all.’
Cilliers is alleged to have tangled his wife’s main parachute and removed two links from her reserve canopy, causing both to fail on April 5, 2015.
Mrs Cilliers, 42, a physiotherapist originally from Haddington, East Lothian, broke her pelvis, leg and several ribs and injured her spine in the fall.
Prosecutors claim South African Cilliers also damaged a gas fitting at their home in Amesbury, Wiltshire, in an attempt to cause an explosion.
Cilliers, of Aldershot, Hampshire, denies two counts of attempted murder and one of damaging property to the reckless endangerment of life.
The trial continues.