MV Lucona was a cargo ship that sank in the Indian Ocean after a powerful time bomb hidden on board exploded.
The subsequent investigation, political scandals, discovery of the shipwreck and murder trials were a major controversy in Austria for nearly 15 years.
[2] Beginning later in 1977, the Austrian investigative journalist Hans Pretterebner wrote a series of magazine articles alleging corruption in the sinking of the Lucona.
[3] Credible allegations emerged that former Austrian Defense Minister Karl Lütgendorf had helped provide the explosives used to sink the ship.
The Austrian Justice Minister Harald Ofner intervened to prevent the case from proceeding, but the courts overruled that decision.
[3] Proksch tried to return to Vienna in October, 1989 but customs officials at Heathrow Airport near London detected his real identity and he was detained when he arrived in Austria.
[5][6] After five months of planning and preparation, the Eastport International support ship MV Valiant Service sailed from Singapore on 12 January 1991.
On the eighth day of searching the seafloor, the operations continued after midnight, and the team located the wreckage in the early hours of 31 January 1991.
When the stern, including the superstructure and the bridge, was found, it became clear that the forward cargo hold had been obliterated and the ship was "literally severed in half", according to Mearns.
The steel hull plates in that area were "splayed outward" which proved that the source of the explosion was within the ship, in the forward cargo hold.
The ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Leopold Gratz, was sentenced for forging documents authenticating the cargo, and Finance Minister Hannes Androsch was dismissed for obstructing the investigations.
Minister of Defense Karl Lütgendorf, a shareholder in the Proksch firm, had given permission to deliver explosives to sabotage the ship, and committed suicide when that became known.
[9] Robert Schindler, the prosecutor, commented that convicting Proksch was a defeat for the "cynical arrogance of power" that Blecha, Gratz, Offner and other corrupt officials used to cover up the Lucona scandal for years.