U.S. PLANE REPORTEDLY TRACKED MISSIONARIES BEFORE THEY WERE SHOT

IQUITOS, Peru -- Drug interdiction flights over Peru have been suspended,
U.S. officials said, after the Peruvian air force shot down an American
missionaries' plane that was mistakenly identified as the carrier of
illegal drugs.

A U.S. surveillance plane was tracking the missionaries' aircraft before it
was shot down and had been in communication with the Peruvian air force, a
Bush administration official in Washington said Saturday night.

A second U.S. government official said the missionaries' 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 longstanding agreement, mistakenly
decided that it was carrying drugs, the official said.

Both officials asked not to be identified.

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.'' A U.S. official
said the decision to suspend the drug interdiction program came after hours
of meetings between White House and State Department aides, including some
traveling with President Bush in Quebec.

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 -- who wasn't aboard the plane -- sat in on the interview.

Emergency landing

The missionary plane, a Cessna 185 that was flying from the Colombian
border toward the city of Iquitos, 620 miles northeast of Lima, tumbled to
an emergency landing in the Amazon River. The pilot, who was shot in the
leg, survived, as did the woman's husband and her son.

``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. 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.

A U.S. Embassy official declined to comment on Bowers' statements.

The U.S. government plane, a twin-engine Cessna Citation jet, was piloted
by a civilian working under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy in Lima. The
U.S. Customs Service operates such flights routinely over Peruvian airspace
in search of low-flying drug runners. Under a longstanding
intelligence-sharing agreement with Peru, the United States passes
information on suspect planes to the Peruvian military, which has a policy
of intercepting the aircraft and forcing them to land or shooting them down.

Peruvian military officials insisted Saturday that the crew of their A-37B
fighter followed ``international procedures of identification and
interception'' spelled out in the intelligence agreement. They said the
missionaries' flight failed to respond to radio messages and signals to land.

`Tragic accident'

In Quebec City, where he was attending the Summit of the Americas, Bush
expressed sorrow over what the White House called a ``tragic accident.''

``The United States is certainly upset by the fact that two American
citizens lost their lives,'' Bush said.

There were sharp differences between Peru's insistence that correct
procedures had been followed and the version provided by the U.S.-based
Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, whose members were aboard the
flight. The Rev. E.C. Haskell, a spokesman for the missionary group, said
the pilot, Kevin Donaldson, had filed a flight plan at Iquitos. Donaldson
was described as an experienced pilot in the Peruvian Amazon, a region
where protestant missionaries have been heavily active for decades.

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.

Flight plan

The Peruvian government statement said the plane entered Peruvian airspace
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 10:48 a.m. Friday.

It was unclear whether the confrontation between the Peruvian jet and
Cessna was visible to the U.S. surveillance plane. An official in
Washington said the U.S. military had monitored a communication between
unknown parties calling for a halt in the interception.

``We monitored a communication that said you should not intercept with
violence, to wait, hold off,'' said the official, who asked not to be
identified. International law and the intelligence-sharing agreement
require that once U.S. officials identify a suspect plane, Peru's military
must first determine if it filed a flight plane with nearby airports, and
then attempt radio contact. If there is no response, intercepting fighters
are to attempt hand signals to the pilot, then rock their wings -- an
internationally recognized signal for ``follow me.'' If all else fails, the
intercepting jet is required to fire a warning shot across the nose of the
plane before shooting at it directly.

A former U.S. official with close knowledge of the agreement and how it has
operated in recent years said the Peruvians have observed those procedures
meticulously in the more than two dozen shoot-downs since 1995, most of
which were recorded on a sophisticated version of videotape by the U.S.
surveillance planes.