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Macedonian President killed in plane crash
Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski was killed when his plane crashed in the mountains of southern Bosnia on Thursday, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said. Ahern was speaking shortly after he had been due to meet Macedonia's prime minister in Dublin. He said that meeting had been cancelled "because of tragic news that President Boris Trajkovski had died in a plane crash over Bosnia". The plane carrying Trajkovski crashed in mountainous terrain in southern Bosnia on Thursday, a government source in the Macedonian capital Skopje said.
Stolac lies amid mountains east of Croatia's Adriatic port of Dubrovnik. "The president was in the plane with several staff members. We have no word on survivors. A chopper is on its way," the government source added.
"There is no doubt about it. We are all in shock. We are waiting for information to see if there are any survivors," another senior government official added.
A source in the Macedonian government said Trajkovski and his entourage were flying in to the Bosnian city of Mostar on an official executive jet, headed for an economic conference there.
The Bosnian Interior Ministry said weather in the area at the time of the crash was bad.
Since his election in late 1999, the 47-year-old lawyer's term has been marked by tensions between Slavic-speaking Macedonians and the former Yugoslav republic's large ethnic Albanian minority.
He presided over a NATO-brokered peace deal in 2001 that ended months of armed clashes and prevented a full blown civil war in the mountainous state bordering Kosovo.
An English-speaker, he has been viewed in the West as a young leader with an international outlook and an ability to build contacts with foreign diplomats and politicians.
He specialized in commercial and employment law and once headed the legal department of a construction company.
In early 1999 he was appointed Macedonia's deputy foreign minister. During the Kosovo crisis that year he accused NATO of paying too little attention to the ethnic tensions brewing in Macedonia, and the influx of 300,000 ethnic Albanian refugees.
The president is married with a son and a daughter.
The mountainous Balkan region, combined with difficult winter weather conditions, can be hazardous for air travel.
In April 1996, a member of U.S. President Bill Clinton's cabinet, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, was among 35 people killed when a U.S. Air Force passenger jet crashed into a mountain near Dubrovnik while trying to land on a trade mission. |
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