New Report Into Trajkovski's Death Blames Pilots

A new report into the death in 2004 of former Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski, conducted by a team of regional experts and released in Sarajevo on Tuesday, once again declared that the fatal plane crash was not the result of an assassination but an accident.

Blaming a deadly combination of pilot errors, technical problems and procedural mistakes, the report is expected to finally end years of speculation about the causes of the disaster.
 
"Our task was to determine how the plane came down and that is what we did," the chief investigator, Omer Kulic, told a press conference on Tuesday.
 
Kulic said that the investigation, conducted by experts from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia, determined that a number of serious mistakes caused the crash on February 26, 2004 near the southwestern Bosnian city of Mostar.  
 
Kulic said the plane was technically unfit for flight as some of its instruments were not working.

These included the low-altitude alarm, one of the two black boxes and the location beacon. The investigation also revealed that the autopilot function had been turned off - which might have saved the plane.  
 
The report also says the flight crew were ill prepared. They failed to check the weather forecast before take-off while the co-pilot, who lacked the appropriate training, ignored warnings from air traffic control to head for an alternative airport due to the bad weather over Mostar. He steadily decreased altitude instead.
 
Nine people died in the crash, including Trajkovski, his team and the flight crew.
 
Trajkovski became President of Macedonia in 1999 and was head of state in 2001, when armed clashes erupted between Macedonian government forces and ethnic Albanian  militants...