CIA personnel aboard a US surveillance plane that helped target an aircraft carrying US missionaries over Peru objected strongly when a Peruvian fighter jet was given authorisation to shoot down the flight before ascertaining who was on board, a US intelligence official said on Sunday.
The three-member crew, contracted by the CIA as part of US anti-drug efforts in Latin America, repeatedly appealed to a Peruvian air force liaison officer on board their flight for additional measures to check the identity of the suspect plane and force it to land peacefully, the official said.
The officer refused to relay the request to the Peruvian fighter jet, the intelligence official said. An American missionary, Ms Veronica Bowers, and her 7-month-old daughter Charity were killed when the air force jet shot down the single engine Cessna 185 owned by the US-based Association of Baptists for World Evangelism.
The surviving missionaries were flown on Sunday from Peru to the US. Mr Jim Bowers, whose wife and daughter were killed, arrived with his 6-yearold son Cory in Morrisville, North Carolina. The aircraft's pilot, Mr Kevin Donaldson (41), a missionary, whose leg was fractured by gunfire, was flown to Philadelphia for medical treatment. He had brought the plane down to a safe landing.
Peru has not yet provided its own public account. The Foreign Minister, Mr Javier Perez de Cuellar, said in Quebec at the Summit of the Americas that "the Peruvian authorities are responsible and we regret what happened".
President Bush said that as a result of the incident, US surveillance flights had been suspended "until we get to the bottom of the situation . . . to understand what went wrong in this terrible tragedy".
Spokesmen for the Baptist missionary in Pennsylvania said that Mr Donaldson had filed a flight plan for the mission.