ANTI-DRUG FLIGHTS HALTED

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.