Macedonian President's plane crashes in bad wx in S Bosnia

[senorpepr]

A plane carrying Macedonia's president to an international investment conference in Bosnia disappeared from radar on Thursday, U.S. peacekeepers said.

The Macedonian government aircraft, carrying President Boris Trajkovski to the conference in the western Bosnian city of Mostar, lost contact with air-traffic controllers near the border between Bosnia and Montenegro, said Capt. Ben Thorp, a spokesman for U.S. peacekeepers in Bosnia.

A plane carrying Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski has crashed in mountainous terrain in southern Bosnia.
Then came this update:
A government official has told Reuters news agency the President's plane has crashed somewhere near the town of Stolac.

Stolac lies amid mountains east of Croatia's Adriatic port of Dubrovnik.
"The President was in the plane with several staff members. We have no word on survivors," the official said.
"A chopper is on its way."
"We are all in shock. We are waiting for information to see if there are any survivors," another senior government official added.

Mr Trajkovski was on his way to an investment conference in Bosnia.
It is reported eight or nine people were on board the small plane, including at least two of Mr Trajkovski's close advisers.

The Bosnian Interior Ministry said weather in the area at the time of the crash was bad.
Since his election in late 1999, the 47-year-old lawyer's term has been marked by tensions between Slavic-speaking Macedonians and the former Yugoslav republic's large ethnic Albanian minority.

He presided over a NATO-brokered peace deal in 2001 that ended months of armed clashes and prevented a full blown civil war in the mountainous state bordering Kosovo.

An English-speaker, he has been viewed in the West as a young leader with an international outlook and an ability to build contacts with foreign diplomats and politicians.

He specialized in commercial and employment law and once headed the legal department of a construction company.
In early 1999 he was appointed Macedonia's deputy foreign minister.
During the Kosovo crisis that year he accused NATO of paying too little attention to the ethnic tensions brewing in Macedonia, and the influx of 300,000 ethnic Albanian refugees.

The President is married with a son and a daughter.
WRECKAGE FOUND: ALL DEAD
Macedonia's president was killed Thursday when his plane crashed in a mountainous part of southern Bosnia en route to an international investment conference, officials said.

The Macedonian government aircraft, carrying President Boris Trajkovski and several other officials to the conference in the western Bosnian city of Mostar, crashed near the village of Bitonja shortly after 8 a.m. local time, the officials said. There were no survivors.

Bosnian police said they found wreckage near the village about 50 miles south of Sarajevo. It was not immediately clear how many people were aboard the plane.

Nedzad Vejzagic, spokesman for the Interior Ministry of Bosnia's Muslim-Croat federation, told The Associated Press that "we received confirmation from our patrols that they have found the wreckage of the Macedonian plane and that there are no survivors."

An AP photographer near the scene said five teams of de-mining experts were headed to the crash site, suggesting the plane may have gone down in an area littered with land mines left over from Bosnia's devastating 1992-95 war.

The weather in the area was poor, and it prompted Albania's prime minister, Fatos Nano, to cancel his own flight to the conference, Nano spokesman Aldrin Dalipi said.

Macedonia was to formally submit its application for eventual membership in the European Union on Thursday in Ireland, but canceled the presentation and called its delegation back from Dublin, officials said.

Trajkovski, 47, studied theology in the United States, where he gave up communism and converted from Orthodox Christianity. He was elected president in November 1999. An ordained Methodist minister, his powers were divided with those of Macedonia's prime minister.

He was widely respected in Macedonia for his neutral stance in the former Yugoslav republic, where tensions persist between Macedonians and the country's ethnic Albanian minority following a 2002 war. He had called for a great inclusion of ethnic Albanians in state bodies and institutions.

Trajkovski is survived by his wife and their son and daughter. Before assuming the presidency, he served as a deputy foreign minister in the center-right government of former Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski.