Macedonian President Killed In Plane Crash

All nine people on board the small plane had died when it went down near the town of Stolac in the early hours of Thursday morning, the advisor told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“All nine are dead. It is confirmed that all nine are dead,” he said.

In addition to Trajkovski, the dead were identified as chief press officer Dimka Ilkova Boskovic, advisors Risto Blazevski and Anita Lozanovska, foreign affairs ministry official Mile Krstevski and security officers Ace Bozinovski and Boris Velinovski.

The co-pilot was identified as Branko Ivanovski but the name of the pilot was not immediately known.

The remains of a plane were late found along with a number of bodies in southern Bosnia, Bosnian police said.

“I can confirm that the wreckage and dead bodies were found in the area between Ljubinje and Stolac,” police spokesman Nedzad Vejzagic said.

Vejzagic said it was too early to say how many bodies had been found.

A spokesman for U.S. peacekeepers in Bosnia said the plane lost contact with air-traffic controllers near the border between Bosnia and Montenegro, the BBC News Online said.

The plane took off from the Macedonian capital, Skopje, earlier on Thursday.

No Causes

There are no reports on the causes of the crash.

Officials in Bosnia said the president’s official executive jet appeared to have smashed into a mountain in fog.

The Bosnian Serb Interior Ministry said there was heavy rain and fog at the time of the crash.

“The weather conditions were very bad with heavy fog and rain,” Zoran Glusac, a spokesman for Bosnian Serb interior ministry, was quoted by Reuters as saying.

Trajkovski’s Cabinet chief, Andrej Lepavcov, told The Associated Press that the European air traffic monitoring agency informed Macedonia’s government that the president’s plane had “disappeared off the radar screens”.

“We know nothing beyond that at this point,” he said.

Since his election in late1999 , the47 -year-old lawyer’s term has seen tensions between Slavic-speaking Macedonians and large ethnic Albanian minority in the former Yugoslav republic.

He presided over a NATO-brokered peace deal in 2001 that ended months of armed clashes and prevented a full civil war in the mountainous state bordering Kosovo