RELATIVES: PERU PLANE HAD CLEARANCE

LIMA, Peru -- A plane carrying American missionaries that apparently was
mistaken for a drug flight and shot down over the Amazon had received
clearance to land and moments later Peru's air force fired on it without
warning, relatives said Sunday.

The relatives' comments were at odds with a version by Peru's military that
the plane failed to identify itself and was flying without a flight plan in
an area frequented by drug traffickers.

Missionary Veronica "Roni" Bowers, 35, and her infant daughter, Charity,
were both killed by the Peruvian gunfire Friday, apparently by a single
bullet that passed through the woman's body and entered the child's skull
as she sat on her mother's lap, her brother-in-law said.

The single-engine plane, which was being tracked by a U.S. counter-drug
surveillance plane, had contacted the air tower in the jungle city of
Iquitos and received landing clearance about 10 minutes before it was
downed, said Richmond Donaldson, father of pilot Kevin Donaldson.

"Here was a plane following a regular route. Drug runners do not follow
regular routes," he said.

"There was the contact with the tower that these other planes should have
heard," the pilot's father said. "They should have checked the plane's
numbering. It was just recently registered."

After being hit by the gunfire, the Cessna 135 crash-landed in the Amazon
River near the jungle town of Huanta, some 626 miles northeast of Lima. The
survivors clung to the pontoons in the river waters. Peruvians rescued the
pilot, 42-year-old Kevin Donaldson, who suffered a crushed leg bone and
severed arteries in his foot caused by the gunfire, and the husband and son
of the woman killed in the shooting.

The husband, Jim Bowers, 37, was debriefed by Peruvian authorities before
returning home to North Carolina on Sunday with the couple's 6-year-old
son, Cory. Donaldson was reportedly headed to a Philadelphia hospital for
surgery.

U.S. officials announced late Saturday that drug interdiction flights over
Peru were being suspended pending a full investigation.

A key dispute is whether the seaplane had a flight plan when it took off
Friday morning from a section of the Amazon River where Peru, Brazil and
Colombia are separated.

President Bush said Sunday that U.S. officials at the time of the attack
had been helping Peru's military identify possible drug smugglers by
providing information, such as tail numbers for planes without a flight plan.

"Our role was top simply to pass on information," Bush said in Quebec,
where he was attending the Summit of the Americas.

A U.S. government official in Washington, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said that an American anti-drug surveillance plane alerted
Peruvians that the missionaries' plane was operating without a flight plan
in airspace frequented by drug runners. He said it was up to Peruvian
officials to then identify the plane's intentions and, he said, they
mistakenly decided it was carrying drugs.

Under current agreements, Peru can use U.S. data only to attack a plane
that is flying without a flight plan. Peruvian fighters must first try to
make radio contact and visually signal a suspect aircraft to land for
inspection before opening fire. If the pilot balks, warning shots must be
fired.

"None of that was done," said Jim Bowers' older brother, Phil, a trained
pilot who sat in on his brother's debriefing by Peruvian authorities.

The Peruvian air force, which has expressed regret for the incident, said
in a statement Saturday that the missionary plane entered Peruvian air
space unannounced from Brazilian territory and was fired upon after
Donaldson failed to respond to "international procedures of identification
and interception."

Phil Bowers disputed that version. "There was no communication. It happened
very fast. The planes flew by first, did some swooping, and then came in
from behind and started shooting," he told The Associated Press in Iquitos,
625 miles northeast of Lima.

One plane, he said, kept firing as the survivors clung to the wreckage in
the water. "We've got hundreds of witnesses from the shore, Peruvians who
were watching from the village of Huanta," he said. The U.S. surveillance
plane also witnessed the air attack, he added.

"Why didn't they call and check the registration?" he said. "Sounds like a
bunch of vigilante, hot shot pilots. Either that or someone higher up
ordered the pilots to shoot."

Mario Justo, chief of Iquitos' airport, told The Associated Press on
Saturday that the plane had a flight plan and that its pilot was in radio
contact with Iquitos' airport control tower.

He later "clarified" his statement, saying a flight plan was only
established at 10:48 a.m. when Donaldson radioed his position, about 45
minutes after Peru's air force says the plane was first detected. Justo
said Donaldson indicated he had taken off from Islandia, a Peruvian river
town just across from Brazil.

The missionaries were shot down about 10 minutes later, according to
Richmond Donaldson, who said that he saw a copy of a flight plan Saturday,
which he believes his son submitted before making the flight.