Pubdate: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 Source: Daily Herald (IL) Copyright: 2001 The Daily Herald Company Contact: http://www.dailyherald.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/107 U.S. SAW PERU JETS SHOOT DOWN MISSIONARIES IQUITOS, Peru - (Associated Press) Drug interdiction flights over Peru have been suspended, U.S. officials announced Saturday, after the Peruvian air force shot down a seaplane carrying American missionaries. The crew aboard the surveillance plane urged Peruvian authorities to check out the flight, said the official, asking not to be identified. A second official said the plane was considered suspect because it was operating without a flight plan in airspace frequented by drug runners. Peru, which had the responsibility to identify the plane's intentions under a long-standing agreement, mistakenly decided that it was carrying drugs, the official said. In Lima, the U.S. Embassy said further drug interdiction flights had been suspended, "pending a thorough investigation and review by Peruvian and U.S. officials of how this tragic incident took place." Also Saturday, Jim Bowers, whose wife and 7-month-old daughter were killed when the plane was shot down, gave his account of the hellish flight to a Peruvian air force colonel investigating the incident. His brother, Phil Bowers, sat in on the interview. Phil Bowers, who was not on the flight, said his brother told the colonel that the Peruvian military made no attempt to communicate over the radio before two or three jets opened fire on the small plane. Hundreds of villagers watched as at least one of the air force planes fired at the disabled Cessna and the survivors as they floated in the Amazon river, Phil Bowers said. He added that the U.S. "surveillance plane also saw the whole thing from up high." A U.S. Embassy official declined to comment on Bowers' statements. Peru's air force issued a statement early Saturday confirming that the missionaries' plane was shot down after it was detected at 10:05 a.m. by "an air space surveillance and control system" run jointly by Peru and the United States. In Quebec, where he was attending the Summit of the Americas, President Bush said Saturday he will "wait to see all the facts" before assigning blame for the deaths. A U.S. official said decision to suspend the drug interdiction program came after hours of meetings between White House and State Department aides, including some traveling with Bush. Peruvian Prime Minister Javier Perez de Cuellar, also in Quebec, approached Bush during an evening summit session and "expressed his deep regret and offered to help the families in any way he could," said White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe. Missionary Veronica "Roni" Bowers, 35, and her daughter, Charity, were both killed. Pilot Kevin Donaldson, of Morgantown, Pa., was seriously injured, shot in his legs. The Bowers' 6-year-old son Cory, also survived. The missionaries' plane was en route from the Brazil-Peru border to Iquitos when it was attacked, said the Rev. E.C. Haskell, spokesman for the New Cumberland, Pa.,-based group, the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism. "It happened very fast. The planes flew by first, did some swooping, and then came in from behind and started shooting," Phil Bowers told The Associated Press in the home of a missionary family in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Iquitos, 625 miles northeast of Lima. "At some point, one of the bullets had gone through Roni's heart, right into the baby's head, from behind. They died instantly, which was a blessing," said Phil Bowers, who is a trained pilot. The Bowers brothers, from Muskegon, Mich., were raised by missionary parents in the Amazon jungles of Brazil. "The planes kept swooping down and shooting" at the survivors even after the crash, as they clung to the capsized plane's pontoons, he said. There were conflicting reports Saturday about whether the missionaries' plane had a flight plan. Under the agreement with the United States, Peru cannot use U.S. air surveillance or radar data to attack a suspected drug plane unless it is flying without a flight plan. The rules of engagement say Peruvian fighters must try to make radio contact and visually signal a suspect aircraft to land for inspection before opening fire. The Peruvian government statement said the plane entered Peruvian air space from Brazil without filing a flight plan and that it was fired on after the pilot failed to respond to "international procedures of identification and interception." But Mario Justo, chief of Iquitos' airport, told The Associated Press on Saturday that the plane did have a flight plan and that its pilot was in radio contact with Iquitos' airport control tower. He later "clarified" his statement, saying the plane did not have a flight plan when it set out from Islandia, next to Brazil's border, Friday morning, but one was established when the pilot made radio contact with Iquitos' airport control tower at about 10:48 a.m. Friday. The plane was expected to land in Iquitos 40 minutes later. Since the early 1990s, Peru has been a key South American ally in the United States' war on drug trafficking. Once the world's leading producers of coca leaf, the raw material used to make cocaine, Peru supplied Colombia's drug cartels. Much of that cocaine went to the United States, the world's biggest consumer of the drug. U.S. officials have hailed Peru's coca eradication efforts as a success. CIA data released in January showed Peru's coca production fell for the fifth consecutive year in 2000. Shootings of aircraft carrying suspected drug traffickers is nothing new. Between 1994 and 1997, Peru shot down about 25 suspected drug planes on their way to Colombian cocaine refineries from coca-growing regions in Peru's Amazon. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth