Pilot’s Fate Still Unknown

The Navy has been unable to determine whether Capt. Michael “Scott” Speicher, the fighter pilot shot down over Iraq in January 1991, is alive, but has concluded that “elements of the former Iraqi regime” know his whereabouts.

Navy Secretary Gordon R. England on Wednesday approved the findings and recommendations of a Navy board of inquiry, leaving Speicher’s official status as “missing/captured.”

The board’s report says that conclusion is based on the fact that some years after Speicher’s F/A-18 fighter was shot down during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi government turned over items from the aircraft and a flight suit.

The report does not identify those in the former government of Saddam Hussein believed to have knowledge about what happened to the pilot.

The Iraqi government maintained from the beginning that Speicher perished at the site where his F/A-18 aircraft crashed.

No evidence to contradict that has surfaced, but the new Navy inquiry concluded there was no credible evidence of his death, either.

The Navy has changed its position on Speicher’s status over the years.

Hours after his plane went down in the desert, the Pentagon declared him killed in action.

Ten years later, the Navy changed his status to missing in action, citing an absence of evidence that he had died.

In October 2002, the Navy switched his status to “missing/captured,” although it has never said what evidence it had that he ever was in captivity.

Among the board’s findings: “That Captain Speicher likely ejected from the aircraft and may have been captured by Iraqi forces.” The Navy report was released as Hussein’s lawyer denied that the ousted Iraqi president had confessed to ordering the deaths of thousands of Kurds in the late 1980s.

The lawyer, Khalil Dulaimi, was responding to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s remarks in a state television broadcast Tuesday.

“There was no confession from the president, and the investigation of this case does not incriminate the president at all,” Dulaimi said, referring to Hussein.