The United States will press China to return an intelligence-gathering plane crippled in a midair crash with a Chinese interceptor on April 1st and seek an explanation of Chinese behavior, a top State Department official said today.
"It's an 80 million plane", Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told reporters."It's ours. We feel the Chinese have a responsibility to return it to us."
Earlier a senior US diplomat said the mid-air collision that sparked a tense US-China stand-off occurred when a Chinese fighter pilot lost control and clipped an American spy plane during a close approach.
China had blamed the American crew for the collision.
The diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, also faulted Beijing's "confrontational" handling of the incident, which the United States believed resulted from pilot error and not China's intentional ramming of the US EP-3 spy plane.
"Our assessment is this wasn't a deliberate act in any way of coming out to try to ram the EP-3, it was a rendezvous that was not accomplished very well," the diplomat told reporters after the 24-member US crew returned to the United States after 11 days in captivity on China's Hainan island.
The official said that by detaining the crew and demanding an American apology based on China's account blaming the US plane for the April 1 collision, "the Chinese missed an opportunity to resolve it well and thereby perhaps take something that was bad and strengthen the relationship."
The envoy added, however, that it was unclear to the United States whether "the Chinese leadership had accurate facts presented to them when they made their initial decision. There's a possibility they were not presented with accurate information."