EVIDENCE cited by a former White House adviser, Mr Pierre Salinger, for his charge that a US Navy missile accidentally shot down TWA alight 800 last July had been circulating freely worldwide on the Internet, it emerged yesterday.
Mr Salinger said yesterday he had found that the document saying the Boeing 747 with 230 people aboard was downed in a missile test off New York had been on the Internet computer network for two months.
Meanwhile, the wreck of a Nigerian Boeing 727 airliner which went missing on Thursday with 141 people on board was located near Lagos, a federal aviation official said.
Mr Salinger, speaking on French television channel TF1 yesterday, admitted he had got the missile document, which he initially said came from a US secret service agent, second hand from an unnamed Frenchman.
"Actually, I found out last night that it had been on Internet for two months," Mr Salinger, the press spokesman for the late president John F. Kennedy and later Paris bureau chief for the US television network ABC, told TF1.
Mr Salinger said his document showed that the navy had conducted the test at an altitude of 3,950 metres in the belief that all aircraft in the area were flying at 6,400 metres.
The airport control tower, in "a tragic error", failed to inform the navy that Trans World Airlines flight 800 had taken off late from New York because of heavy traffic and was flying lower than expected to stay clear of another aircraft, he said.
After saying initially he had been given the document in Paris by a US secret service agent, Mr Salinger later said he received it five weeks ago "from a Frenchman involved in various government things who had met a man from the US Secret Service who had written a paper on what happened in the TWA crash".
Mr Salinger (71) nevertheless said he stood by the document's allegations. He later left his hotel in the Mediterranean resort of Cannes for an undisclosed destination.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Defence Department both insisted there was no evidence that a missile was involved in the crash.
The US Navy said it had no weapons in the area at the time that could have shot down the airliner, and federal investigators had already found the possibility "without merit".
Mr Salinger said he was not surprised by the denials and offered to show the FBI his document, suggesting the evidence his possession might have withheld to avoid embarrassing President Bill Clinton before Tuesday's presidential election.
But the head of the FBI in New York, Mr James Kalstrom, denied there had been a cover up: "I can assure the American people that we are not in the business of covering things up. We would never, ever, ever do that," he said. Mr Salinger said he had decided to make his allegations after the French weekly Paris Match published a "very important" picture and "no one in the United States looked at this for one second".
The picture, said to have been taken during a party on Long Island at the time of the crash, appeared to show a missile like object streaking through the sky.
Mr Salinger said he had passed on his information to ABC, which told him: "Now is not the time."
Meanwhile, the wreckage of the missing Nigerian Boeing 727 was located by a search helicopter in marshland near the Egbin power station, near Ikorodu, about 30 km north east of Lagos.
The plane disappeared on Thursday at 5.05 p.m. local time on a one hour flight from the south eastern city of Port Harcourt to Lagos.
Western diplomats said a number of foreigners were aboard the aircraft, including five Britons, an Italian and an Israeli. No survivors have been found.
Nigeria's military government released a statement expressing its condolences to the relatives of the crash victims yesterday.