PERU SHOOTS DOWN U.S. PLANE, KILLING 2

Group Of Missionaries Were Mistaken For Drug Smugglers

MIAMI -- An American woman and her 7-month-old daughter were killed Friday
when a Peruvian air force plane mistook a small aircraft full of U.S.
missionaries for a narco-trafficker flight and shot it up, U.S. officials
in Lima said.

Peru's air force issued a statement early Saturday confirming that the
missionary plane was shot down Friday morning by "an air space surveillance
and control system" operated jointly with the United States for
counternarcotics efforts.

The statement said the plane entered Peruvian air space from Brazil without
filing a flight plan and that it was fired upon to force it down after the
pilot failed to identify himself.

Veronica Bowers, 35, and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, both of
Muskegon, Mich., were killed when their small Cessna aircraft was attacked
by the Peruvian air force plane over the Amazonian jungle about 700 miles
northeast of Lima.

The Cessna's pilot, 43-year-old Kevin Donaldson of Morgantown, W.Va., was
wounded in the leg during the attack, missionary officials said, and was in
serious condition. Two other passengers in the Cessna -- Bowers'
37-year-old husband, Jim, and their small son Corey -- were uninjured.

"This is a real tragedy," said E.C. Haskell, a spokesman for the
Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, the Harrisburg, Pa.-based
organization for which the Bowers worked. "It's nearly unbelievable."

The Cessna was en route to Iquitos, a Peruvian provincial capital in the
Amazon where the Bowers family needed to pick up some immigration documents
for their newly adopted daughter, when the attack occurred.

The crippled Cessna landed on a river near the tiny jungle town of Juanta,
Peruvian officials said, about 100 miles short of Iquitos.

The region is heavily traveled by narco-traffickers flying coca, the raw
material used in cocaine, from camps in the Peruvian Amazon to Colombian
cocaine refineries.

In July, then-president Alberto Fujimori announced Peru would use its fleet
of 18 Russian-made Sukhoi-25 fighter jets in the anti-drug fight.

The U.S. government has strongly supported Peru's aggressive anti-narcotics
fight. U.S. counternarcotics aid to Peru is believed to exceed $100 million
a year.