Bodies From Aid Flight Found in Kosovo

NATO-led peacekeeping troops and U.N. officials recovered bodies today from the wreckage of a World Food Program aircraft carrying 24 people that crashed Friday in rugged terrain littered with land mines in northern Kosovo, a U.N. spokesman said.

The plane crashed near the top of a 4,600-foot mountain near the village of Slakovce, 20 miles north of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, NATO spokesman Sgt. Maj. Mark Cox said.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops and United Nations officials sent to the crash site found the plane in small pieces and recovered the bodies of some of the victims, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said in New York. Mine disposal teams also were dispatched to the site.

“None of the people on board were believed to have survived,” Eckhard said.

The cause of the crash was not known.

The propeller-driven ATR-42, carrying 21 passengers and three crew members, was en route from Rome to Pristina. Most of those on board were humanitarian aid workers for nongovernmental agencies.

“A lot of corpses could be seen from the helicopter, and also the aircraft is badly damaged,” said Capt. Tony Mouchet, NATO press spokesman for the battalion that found the plane.

The region is strewn with land mines left over from Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s efforts to wipe out ethnic Albanians.

Milosevic’s deadly “ethnic cleansing” campaign sparked an 11-week air war by NATO. Peacekeepers entered Kosovo--a province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic--after the war ended in June.

The crash site is several miles south of the border with Serbia.

The six-day-a-week flight left Rome at 9 a.m. The chartered plane disappeared while on approach to the airport in Pristina about two hours later, NATO officials said.

No list of passengers was available. But Italy’s ANSA news agency said there had been nine Italians on board--the two pilots, a flight attendant, two doctors, a spokeswoman for the food program, a volunteer chemist, a police officer and an aid worker. Four of the nine were women, ANSA said.

In Ottawa, the Department of Foreign Affairs said one Canadian was on the aircraft.

The U.N. administrator in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, was traveling to the crash site by road Friday night, Eckhard said.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is visiting Japan, was “shocked and deeply saddened” at news of the crash and extended deepest sympathy to “the loved ones” the victims left behind, Eckhard said.