At worst, the Dutch Prime Minister, Mr Wim Kok, his most trusted and senior Cabinet Ministers and a handful of top civil servants expected to suffer the ignominy of being convicted of carelessness in the aftermath of their handling of the 1992 El Al Air crash - the worst civil aviation disaster in Dutch history.
But after a report published yesterday in The Hague following a six-month parliamentary inquiry, the fall-out is considerably worse than expected. A catalogue of accusations against Mr Kok - recently seen as a front-runner in the search for a successor to Mr Jacques Santer as EU president - and present and former members of his Cabinet has caused political shock waves and hit at the heart of his government.
Opposition politicians predict "explosive consequences" for the "purple" coalition, made up of left-wing, right-wing and centreleft Liberals, as Mr Kok, government leader since 1994, was charged with behaving in "a manner inappropriate to his position", and with providing "fragmented" leadership, by a five-member parliamentary commission.
The political fate of the Prime Minister and his ministers, who failed to act appropriately once the scale of the air crash and its feared implications for public health were known, will be decided when parliament debates the report next month.
Mr Kok's two deputy prime ministers, Dr Els Borst, Health Minister since 1994, and Ms Annemarie Jorritsma, Minister for Economic Affairs and former Transport Minister, stood accused of "repeatedly" presenting "incomplete or false" information to parliament in a fashion that was frequently "untimely, sloppy or negligent".
The commission also accused El Al of being "unco-operative" in supplying documents relating to the jumbo jet cargo immediately after the crash. The Israeli airline did not provide missing cargo documents until February 20th, nearly 61/2 years after the plane lost two engines from one wing and ploughed into an apartment block in Bijlmer, south-east of Amsterdam, killing at least 43 people, soon after taking off from Schiphol Airport.
More than 3,000 residents and rescue workers have since filed complaints concerning medical problems purportedly related to the accident. Many claimed hazardous chemicals aboard the plane had made them ill, but that their health problems were systematically ignored. Having failed to take their complaints seriously, the Dutch government only reluctantly agreed to the inquiry amid intense political pressure as inconvenient and embarrassing facts pointing to a possible cover-up and incompetence emerged.
A leading Dutch pathologist, Mr Jan Weening, who saw 12 patients with auto-immune disease and diagnosed symptoms in a further 13 people, all of them residents and rescuers, told the inquiry that his call for a programme of blood tests was ignored by the health ministry and that officials refused when asked by him to alert GPs to look out for signs of the disease. The report said there was "a direct relationship between health complaints and the disaster", adding that Deputy Prime Minister and Health Minister Borst should have launched a detailed medical study.
Families of the victims said only some of their questions had been answered.
"The report has failed to provide any insight into the real cause of the accident or why for years and years El Al refused to release details of the cargo; mysterious men in white suits were seen at the crash site and nobody knows what they took away but the cockpit voice recorder was never recovered. The ineptitude of government ministers and their top civil servants is proven and they should now do the decent thing and resign," Bijlmer residents' chairman Mr Henk van der Belt told The Irish Times.
"We can never bring back our loved ones but those who helped to cover up the truth or prevented it being told should pay the price."