U.S. SURVEILLANCE ALERTED PERU TO MISSIONARY PLANE

IQUITOS, Peru - The airplane carrying American missionaries that was shot
down Friday in Peru had been mistakenly identified as a carrier of
contraband drugs, a State Department official said Saturday night.

The official declined to say whether the mistake was made by a United
States aircraft, but there was an American surveillance plane in the area
that was communicating with Peruvian military aircraft.

A missionary and her infant daughter were killed when the plane was downed
by fire from a Peruvian Air Force jet fighter.

Drug interdiction flights over Peru were suspended, U.S. officials
announced Saturday.

The missionary plane was tracked by a U.S. surveillance plane before it was
downed, a Bush administration official said Saturday night.

The crew aboard the surveillance plane urged Peruvian authorities to check
out the flight, said the Bush 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.

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 at radio contact 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 confirmed Saturday that the missionaries' plane was shot
down after it was detected at 10:05 a.m. by "an airspace 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 the decision to suspend the drug interdiction program
came after 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
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
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 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.