PLANE DEBRIS FOUND IN HILLS OF COLOMBIA

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Wreckage found Sunday on a mountainside in
southwestern Colombia might be that of a U.S. Army plane that
disappeared while on a counternarcotics mission over rebel-dominated
territory, the U.S. Army said.

The wreckage was on a mountainside in southern Putumayo province, near
the border with Ecuador, said Capt. Jack Miller, a spokesman for the
United States Southern Command in Miami, the U.S. military's
operations base for Latin America.

"We have not yet determined, though, whether it is the aircraft we are
looking for," Miller said.

Heavy cloud cover and the approaching night would probably make it
impossible to definitively identify the crashed aircraft until today,
Miller said.

U.S. and Colombian aircraft have searched since early Saturday to find
the four-engine de Havilland RC-7, a high-tech reconnaissance plane
that disappeared Friday with five U.S. soldiers and two Colombian air
force officers.

The U.S. army had not released the names of the five soldiers, who are
based at Fort Bliss army base in El Paso.

U.S. officials say the plane was on a routine counternarcotics mission
over an area where drug crops are grown when it disappeared from radar
screens.

Colombia, the world's No. 1 source of cocaine and a growing exporter
of heroin, is the primary focus of U.S. anti-narcotics operations in
the hemisphere. U.S. aid this year tripled to roughly $300 million.

The U.S. Army is helping to train and equip a new, 1,500- member
counternarcotics battalion.

The new force will operate largely in the rebel-dominated south, where
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, partly finances
itself by taxing the peasants who grow drug crops and protecting
traffickers' airstrips and laboratories.

The U.S. government also recently began sharing intelligence on rebels
with the army units taking part in anti-narcotics operations.