Wreckage in Colombia May Be a Missing Plane

Aerial search crews working in bad weather Sunday found wreckage that authorities believe is the U.S. military reconnaissance plane that disappeared Friday during a routine anti-drug mission over a mountainous jungle region of southern Colombia controlled by leftist guerrillas.

“There’s reason to believe the aircraft is down. The wreckage site is under observation, and efforts to get to that site are underway,” Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the U.S. national drug control policy director, said at a news conference in Miami before leaving for Bogota, the Colombian capital, on a previously scheduled trip.

A military source said that authorities had picked up an electronic signal in guerrilla-controlled Putumayo province near the border with Ecuador that may have been from tracking equipment aboard the missing De Havilland RC-7 plane but that low cloud cover had prevented searchers from confirming that it was the aircraft.

McCaffrey said it was not known when investigators would get to the plane, which carried five U.S. Army soldiers and two Colombian air force officers.

“That will unfold in the coming 24 hours,” he said.

The U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which is responsible for military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, said search teams had made a “visual sighting” of wreckage late Sunday afternoon.

But because of the weather, officials said, they had not been able to get close enough to the site to identify the plane, most likely by its tail number.