Boris Trajkovski - Death

Death

Trajkovski died on 26 February 2004 in a plane crash en route to an economic conference in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The aircraft crashed in thick fog and heavy rain on a mountainside in southeastern Herzegovina, near the villages of Huskovici and Rotimlja some eight miles (15 km) south-south-east of Mostar. Eight other people were also aboard but none survived the impact, which broke the aircraft into three pieces. It came down in an area that had been heavily mined during the Bosnian War of the 1990s, which significantly hampered the rescue and recovery efforts.

Although the cause of the crash is not known, it seems likely that it was the result of a controlled flight into terrain, possibly exacerbated by alleged mistakes made by the SFOR air traffic controllers at Mostar Ortiješ International Airport. The approach to the airport's Runway 34 has been criticized by pilots for being difficult to handle, and as the runway is not equipped with precision landing systems, it is especially challenging in bad weather. The crash is not the first major air accident to kill a politician in southern Herzegovina: on April 3, 1996, the United States Secretary of Commerce Ronald Brown was killed while en route from Bosnia to Croatia.