Mourners outside parliament in Macedonia's capital, Skopje

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February 27, 2004

Macedonian President Killed In Plane Crash NEAR STOLAC, Bosnia (Reuters) - Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski, hailed in the West as a peacemaker who averted civil war, was killed when his plane crashed into a Bosnian mountainside in thick fog, officials say.

His death was confirmed by Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who was to have held talks in Dublin with Macedonia's prime minister on the day of the country's formal application to join the European Union.

A Bosnian official said the wreck had been found and there were no survivors among the nine aboard. A Reuters reporter said at least one convoy of NATO and Bosnian police vehicles and ambulances had yet to reach the site four hours after the flight disappeared from radar screens at 8:01 a.m..

"Most probably he is dead," a senior Macedonian official told Reuters in the capital, Skopje. A Trajkovski aide said there would be no confirmation "until a body is identified".

Macedonian radio and television broadcast only solemn music.
The 47-year-old Trajkovski had been on a short flight to the Bosnian town of Mostar for an economic conference.
A Methodist Christian preacher and career lawyer, he 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.

Macedonian officials described the president's plane as an ageing Beechcraft 200 Super King Air twin-engined turboprop with two crew and six aides on board in addition to the president.


Bosnian officials, who earlier gave a later crash time, said it seemed to go down south of Stolac, inland from the Croatian port of Dubrovnik, a treacherous zone for aviation in winter.

In April 1996, a member of U.S. President Bill Clinton's cabinet, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, was among 35 people killed when a U.S. Air Force passenger jet got into trouble and crashed into a mountain in the same vicinity.

AGEING PLANE, BAD WEATHER
The official Macedonian Information Centre said Trajkovski's plane had "several times" nearly cost officials their lives. A Bosnian official added that "weather conditions were very bad with heavy fog and rain" on Thursday morning.

Helicopters of the U.S.-led NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia, helping rescuers and police, were spotted hovering over a steep mountainside but no wreckage was visible and access was restricted. Local people said the area may still be mined from the days of the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

Macedonian Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski was already in Dublin when news of the crash was announced, on a mission to formally deliver his country's application to join the European Union, of which Ireland holds the presidency at the moment.

Journalists travelling with him were told to pack up and be ready for an immediate flight back to Macedonia.
From his election in late 1999, Trajkovski's term was marked by tensions between Macedonians and the former Yugoslav republic's large ethnic Albanian minority.
Although his powers were limited and his role largely ceremonial, 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.
Prime Minister Crvenkovski will retain the main powers.

Mark Laity, a NATO official who worked as an adviser to Trajkovski during the 2001 crisis, said he was devastated:
"In 2001 no Macedonian was more important to stopping that country having a civil war. He was controversial and people often attacked him, but in the end he was a person who could always be relied on to do the right thing,"
Laity said.

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.
Trajkovski was married with a son and a daughter.