http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4447461
NEAR STOLAC, Bosnia (Reuters) - Troops and police hunted for Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski in mountains in southern Bosnia on Thursday after his small plane disappeared from radar screens and he was presumed dead.
In Skopje, Macedonian Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski said the country had "suffered a great loss" and it was time to mourn but did not say explicitly Trajkovski had been killed.
NATO troops and Bosnian police combed the mountains searching for the wreckage of the twin-engined Beechcraft and its missing nine occupants. It disappeared from radar screens at 8.01 a.m. (0701 GMT), minutes before a scheduled landing at the city of Mostar.
The hunt was suspended as darkness fell and was due to resume at first light on Friday. Officials said Macedonia could not say officially the president was dead until a body had been found and identified.
Crvenkovski told reporters there was "no word of survivors" from Bosnian authorities.
The death of Trajkovksi, hailed in the West for averting civil war in Macedonia, was announced in Dublin by Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern after Crvenkovski, visiting the Irish capital, postponed their talks to return home.
A 47-year-old Methodist preacher and lawyer, Trajkovski made his name internationally during a crisis with ethnic Albanian rebels that brought the former Yugoslav republic to the brink of civil war in 2001. With NATO help, he oversaw a peace deal.
DECREPIT PLANE
"Our first information was that SFOR saw parts of the wreckage, but later they backed from that information," the source told Reuters. He said NATO blocked Bosnia from using helicopters over the area until six hours after the crash.
A spokesman for Bosnia's civil aviation authority, Dzelal Hasecic, told Reuters the NATO peace mission SFOR was in charge of air traffic in Mostar airspace, adding that it was "quite normal that SFOR is now denying its responsibility as the plane crash could be the result of a controller's error."
But Macedonian officials described the president's plane as a dangerously decrepit turboprop which former Foreign Minister Slobodan Casule said should have been grounded long ago but had been kept flying to save money.
"The pressure from the public was brutal when we said 'No' to flying on those planes," he told Reuters Television. "I had an incident in Bucharest on that very same plane, when the windshield blew off."
NATO meanwhile denied all official Macedonian and Bosnian reports that its peacekeepers had found the crash site.
In a sometimes chaotic search over an area where land mines remain a risk, a convoy of NATO and Bosnian police vehicles, ambulances and de-mining units scoured muddy routes in a valley and mountainsides south of the town of Stolac.
The skies inland from the Croatian port of Dubrovnik are treacherous in winter. A Bosnian official said the weather was "very bad with heavy fog and rain."
In April 1996, a member of U.S. President Bill Clinton's cabinet, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, was among 35 killed when a U.S. Air Force passenger jet struck a nearby mountain.
NEAR STOLAC, Bosnia (Reuters) - Troops and police hunted for Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski in mountains in southern Bosnia on Thursday after his small plane disappeared from radar screens and he was presumed dead.
In Skopje, Macedonian Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski said the country had "suffered a great loss" and it was time to mourn but did not say explicitly Trajkovski had been killed.
NATO troops and Bosnian police combed the mountains searching for the wreckage of the twin-engined Beechcraft and its missing nine occupants. It disappeared from radar screens at 8.01 a.m. (0701 GMT), minutes before a scheduled landing at the city of Mostar.
The hunt was suspended as darkness fell and was due to resume at first light on Friday. Officials said Macedonia could not say officially the president was dead until a body had been found and identified.
Crvenkovski told reporters there was "no word of survivors" from Bosnian authorities.
The death of Trajkovksi, hailed in the West for averting civil war in Macedonia, was announced in Dublin by Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern after Crvenkovski, visiting the Irish capital, postponed their talks to return home.
A 47-year-old Methodist preacher and lawyer, Trajkovski made his name internationally during a crisis with ethnic Albanian rebels that brought the former Yugoslav republic to the brink of civil war in 2001. With NATO help, he oversaw a peace deal.
DECREPIT PLANE
"Our first information was that SFOR saw parts of the wreckage, but later they backed from that information," the source told Reuters. He said NATO blocked Bosnia from using helicopters over the area until six hours after the crash.
A spokesman for Bosnia's civil aviation authority, Dzelal Hasecic, told Reuters the NATO peace mission SFOR was in charge of air traffic in Mostar airspace, adding that it was "quite normal that SFOR is now denying its responsibility as the plane crash could be the result of a controller's error."
But Macedonian officials described the president's plane as a dangerously decrepit turboprop which former Foreign Minister Slobodan Casule said should have been grounded long ago but had been kept flying to save money.
"The pressure from the public was brutal when we said 'No' to flying on those planes," he told Reuters Television. "I had an incident in Bucharest on that very same plane, when the windshield blew off."
NATO meanwhile denied all official Macedonian and Bosnian reports that its peacekeepers had found the crash site.
In a sometimes chaotic search over an area where land mines remain a risk, a convoy of NATO and Bosnian police vehicles, ambulances and de-mining units scoured muddy routes in a valley and mountainsides south of the town of Stolac.
The skies inland from the Croatian port of Dubrovnik are treacherous in winter. A Bosnian official said the weather was "very bad with heavy fog and rain."
In April 1996, a member of U.S. President Bill Clinton's cabinet, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, was among 35 killed when a U.S. Air Force passenger jet struck a nearby mountain.
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