2 GIs Probably Shot, Findings Indicate : El Salvador: Rebels deny executing three after chopper crash. Broadcast calls on U.S. to support peace efforts.

Preliminary investigations by U.S. forensic experts strongly suggest that leftist Salvadoran rebels shot two U.S. servicemen dead as they lay wounded after guerrillas shot down their helicopter, which also carried a third American, a source close to the investigation said Friday.

The rebels, meanwhile, denied executing the three, and called on the Bush Administration to support a negotiated end to El Salvador’s 11-year-old civil war.

The U.S. Army Southern Command in Panama on Friday identified the victims as Lt. Col. David H. Pickett, 40, of Cavandish, Vt., the pilot; Chief Warrant Officer Daniel S. Scott, 39, of San Diego, the co-pilot; and Sgt. 1st Class Earnest G. Dawson, 20, of Bollingbrook, Ill., the mechanic.

The preliminary investigation showed that Pickett had a wound in the cheek with a downward trajectory, the unidentified source said, suggesting that he was shot on the ground and not from below while in the air. Dawson had two bullet wounds in his upper cheekbone, the source said, and Scott died of wounds sustained when rebels downed the helicopter with rifle fire Wednesday, 75 miles east of San Salvador.

The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, contended in a broadcast statement that the Americans died of injuries received in or before the crash.

“One of the crewmen was found dead with a bullet wound in the cranium and the other two were found seriously wounded,” the statement said.

“After giving them basic first aid, (the wounded crewmen) were turned over to the civilian population,” the FMLN said. Witnesses to the crash say the guerrillas asked them to take the wounded crewmen to a hospital.

The FMLN contends that it inadvertently shot down the helicopter. The State Department had said Thursday that all three crewmen appeared to have bullet wounds to the head, raising the possibility that they were executed after surviving the crash.

The Pentagon said the victims were members of the Army’s 4th Battalion of the 228th Aviation Regiment and were returning to Honduras after flying a routine mission to San Salvador.

Western diplomatic sources said that if the U.S. soldiers were executed by members of the FMLN, the incident could result in the restoration of $42.5 million in U.S. military aid now being withheld from El Salvador.

“It would be a very important factor for Congress and Washington to consider,” one diplomat said.

Congress voted last year to withhold half of the $85 million in 1991 military aid approved for El Salvador because of the Salvadoran military’s involvement in the Nov. 16, 1989, murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teen-age daughter.

The FMLN, in a broadcast on its clandestine Radio Farabundo Marti, called on the U.S. government to reconsider its involvement in El Salvador’s long civil war and to give its full support to ongoing peace talks.

The United States has about 50 military advisers in El Salvador, where it has backed successive governments in their fight against the rebels with about $1 billion in military aid over the course of the war.

The UH-1 helicopter was shot down Wednesday while returning to its base in neighboring Honduras after a routine mission to transport troops inside El Salvador, the Pentagon said. It said the craft was flying 50 feet off the ground under new guidelines aimed at avoiding rebel surface-to-air missiles.

BACKGROUND

Civil war and political upheaval in El Salvador have claimed more than 30 American lives in the past decade. The most celebrated cases: the slaying of three Roman Catholic nuns and a lay worker by gunmen as they left El Salvador’s international airport in December, 1980; the murder in January, 1981, of American labor advisers Mark David Pearlman and Michael P. Hammer as they sat in a hotel coffee shop in the capital; the massacre of six Americans, including four U.S. Marines assigned to embassy security, when rebels opened fire at an outdoor restaurant in the capital’s fashionable “Pink Zone.”