Macedonia's president killed in plane crash

Macedonia’s president Boris Trajkovski was killed today when his plane crashed in a mountainous part of southern Bosnia en route to an international investment conference.

Vlatko Djordjev, a spokesman for Trajkovski’s party, VMRO-DPMNE, said he was told by party headquarters in Skopje that the 47-year-old Macedonian president was killed in the crash.

The Macedonian government aircraft, carrying Trajkovski and several other officials to the conference in the western Bosnian city of Mostar, crashed near the Bosnian village of Bitonja shortly after 8am (7am Irish time).

Bosnian police said they found wreckage near the village about 50 miles south of Sarajevo.

The weather in the area was said to be poor, and it prompted Albania’s prime minister, Fatos Nano, to cancel his own flight to the conference, Nano spokesman Aldrin Dalipi said.

Macedonia was to formally submit its application for eventual membership in the European Union in Ireland today, but cancelled the presentation and called its delegation back from Dublin, officials said.

Trajkovski studied theology in the United States, where he gave up communism and converted from Orthodox Christianity.

He was elected president in November 1999. An ordained Methodist minister, his powers were divided with those of Macedonia’s prime minister.

He was widely respected in Macedonia for his neutral stance in the former Yugoslav republic, where tensions persist between Macedonians and the country’s ethnic Albanian minority following a 2002 war.

He had called for a greater inclusion of ethnic Albanians in state bodies and institutions.

Trajkovski is survived by his wife and their son and daughter. Before assuming the presidency, he served as a deputy foreign minister in the centre-right government of former Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski.

Nedzad Vejzagic, spokesman for the Interior Ministry of Bosnia's Muslim-Croat federation, said they had "received confirmation from our patrols that they have found the wreckage of the Macedonian plane and that there are no survivors".

An AP photographer near the scene said five teams of de-mining experts were headed to the crash site, suggesting the plane may have gone down in an area littered with land mines left over from Bosnia’s devastating 1992-95 war.