Twelve people, including a senior diplomat, were killed when a UN helicopter crashed into a hill in central Bosnia yesterday. The German Foreign Minister, Mr Klaus Kinkel, told a news conference in Bonn later that the dead comprised five Germans, five Americans, a Briton and a Pole. His understanding was that the four Ukrainian crew, including the pilot, had survived the crash, which happened at around 10 a.m local time.
Earlier, western officials said that 11 people had died in the crash, including German diplomat Mr Gerd Wagner, deputy to the international High Representative to Bosnia, and that five had survived.
The helicopter, carrying senior officials in the UN mission and other international organisations to talks with local authorities in the town of Bugojno in Bosnia's Muslim-Croat Federation, took off at around 9.15 a.m. from Sarajevo.
UN police and NATO officers began searching for the craft, a Soviet-built Mi-8 transport, at about midday, after it failed to land as scheduled in Bugojno, north of Fojnica.
One of the crew members later told the UN that the helicopter had crashed in dense fog, causing the fuel tank to explode.
Two of the crew were being treated at the Kosevo civilian hospital in Sarajevo last night for minor injuries. 9942069
As one of two deputy High Representatives in Bosnia under the international mediator, Mr Carlos Westendorp, Mr Wagner was regarded as a strong supporter of President Biljana Plavsic in the current power struggle between rival Serb factions.
He had stressed his support for "all those who would weaken the monolithic block" in Serb Bosnia. The married father of three arrived in Sarajevo in July, having been proposed for the post by the Bonn government, which transferred him from his previous position of director of the political department at the German embassy in Washington.
One of Mr Wagner's priorities was to create the right conditions for the safe return and housing of refugees. He was a fluent Serbo-Croat speaker, and told the daily Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodenje last month that he had "the impression that people have already accepted me". Meanwhile, Bosnia's election supervisors, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), pressed ahead yesterday with vote-counting in Bosnia's local elections. Tension is already high after the OSCE's Bosnia mission chief, Mr Robert Frowick, overruled a judgment by an election supervisory body to punish the main Serb party for its links to indicted war crimes suspect Dr Radovan Karadzic. In the Serb-held Sarajevo suburb of Lukavica, sackfuls of ballot papers arrived at a central counting centre, escorted by troops from the peacekeeping NATO-led Stabilisation Force, SFOR.
Dozens of local workers drawn from Bosnia's Serb, Muslim and Croat communities will jointly monitor the counting to avoid arguments over the results, OSCE officials said.
An OSCE spokesman, Mr David Foley, said the count at Lukavica was being done "in the full glare of the public spotlight for everyone in Bosnia-Herzegovina so that they can have full confidence in what is going on there". Suspicion among Bosnia's former warring communities remains deep-seated despite nearly one-and-a-half years of peace.
The local elections are the last major political step in the Dayton peace accords, which ended the conflict in December 1995.