U.S. MONITORED PERU AREA WHERE MISSIONARY PLANE WAS HIT

IQUITOS, Peru, April 21 (AP) -- A United States surveillance plane on a
drug interdiction mission was monitoring the area where a Peruvian fighter
jet shot down a plane carrying American missionaries on Friday, an American
Embassy official said today.

A woman and her infant daughter from Michigan were killed in the shooting
and the crash.

The American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to say
whether the United States aircraft had provided the position of the
single-engine pontoon plane that was shot down. But the officials said
American tracking planes routinely passed along information to the Peruvian
authorities about suspicious aircraft in the northern jungle region
bordering Colombia and Brazil, a common route for drug traffickers.

Since the early 1990's, Peru has been an important ally of the United
States' regional efforts to halt drug trafficking, which dropped
substantially in Peru after Alberto K. Fujimori, who was president then,
announced that his military would shoot down small planes suspected of
ferrying drugs. 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.

The United States briefly suspended the cooperation agreement in May 1994
out of concern that American officials could be held liable if Peru shot
down the wrong aircraft.

The embassy official's statement came after one of the three survivors of
the incident reportedly said an American aircraft was flying nearby when
the Peruvian A-37B Dragonfly attack jet shot down the missionaries' plane.

The survivors told of how their pilot, a second-generation missionary, was
shot in the leg during the flight. He then lost control of the flaming
plane before managing to guide it into the Amazon River, where they floated
on the craft's pontoons for half an hour before being rescued by villagers.

The missionaries' plane was en route from the Brazil-Peru border to the
city of Iquitos, about 625 miles northeast of Lima, when it came under fire
from the Peruvian fighter, said the Rev. E. C. Haskell, spokesman for the
Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, based in New Cumberland, Pa.

Amid conflicting reports about whether the missionaries' plane had a flight
plan, the American official in Lima acknowledged that "a U.S. government
tracking aircraft was in the area in support of the Peruvian intercept
mission."

The official said that "as part of an agreement between the United States
and Peru, the United States provides tracking information on planes
suspected of smuggling illegal drugs in the region to the Peruvian air force."

But, he added, "the U.S. government tracking aircraft used for this purpose
are unarmed and do not participate in any way in the shooting down of
suspect planes."

In Quebec, where he was attending the Summit of the Americas, President
Bush said today, "The United States is certainly upset by the fact that two
citizens lost their lives." But he added, "I will wait to see all the facts
before I reach any conclusions about blame."

Peru's Air Force issued a statement early today confirming that the
missionaries' plane was shot down after it was detected at 10:05 a.m. local
time by "an airspace surveillance and control system" run jointly by Peru
and the United States.

The statement said the plane had 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 the Iquitos airport, said that the plane did have
a flight plan and that its pilot was in radio contact with the airport
control tower, offering periodic reports on his position.

The plane was expected to land in Iquitos at about 11:10 a.m., but failed
to check in with a radio report. "The control tower in Iquitos informed the
air force and requested assistance," Mr. Justo said. "I have information
that there was contact with the tower, and if there hadn't been a flight
plan, we wouldn't have known about the flight's existence."

In the shooting, one missionary, Veronica "Roni" Bowers, 37, and her
7-month-old adopted daughter, Charity, were killed, and the pilot, Kevin
Donaldson, was wounded, Mr. Haskell said.

Also on board and unhurt were Ms. Bowers' husband, Jim Bowers, 35, and
their 6-year-old son, Cory, he said. The family is from Muskegon, Mich.,
and Mr. Donaldson is from Morgantown, Pa.

Mr. Donaldson's wife, Bobbi, said her husband had guided the plane into the
river, where it flipped over. Mrs. Bowers was holding her daughter on her
lap when a bullet struck her in the back and then hit the child, Mrs.
Donaldson said by telephone from her home in Iquitos. "There were two
rounds of fire," she said, and the Peruvian jet continued to fire as the
plane went down,

She said that after the plane put down, local villagers took her husband to
a nearby jungle clinic, where he remained this morning.

The Bowers had been returning from Leticia, Colombia, where they had picked
up a Peruvian residency visa for their daughter, Mrs. Donaldson said. She
said another Peruvian Air Force plane -- called in by the jet fighter --
took Mr. Bowers, his son and his dead wife and daughter to Iquitos.