Senator Hopeful of New Speicher Clues
W A S H I N G T O N, July 11 -- Despite a senator's optimistic claims to the contrary, U.S. military officials say they still have no solid clues on what happened to missing Navy Capt. Scott Speicher, the pilot shot down on the first day of the first Gulf War.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., returned from Iraq this week claiming to have "new and highly classified" evidence that showed investigators making progress toward solving the mystery of Speicher's fate.
"New evidence has been produced," Nelson said this week. "New evidence that is classified, but that gives me reason to be optimistic for the first time in several weeks that I have been pessimistic. That doesn't say that he's alive, but that says that we're beginning to get evidence that, in fact, we might be able to find out."
In Iraq, a team of investigators has been scouring documents, interviewing Iraqis and exhuming graves in an effort to solve the mystery. But so far, military officials say, little new information has been uncovered.
Document, Prison Log Book Found
Officials said a document bearing Speicher's name has been found in Iraq. The significance of the document has not yet been determined. But there are many reasons — not all nefarious — that the Iraqi government might have written down the name of a person who was the subject of a decade of international wrangling.
Sources also say the U.S. military now has a log book that lists names of those held in Baghdad at Hakmiyah prison, where the letters "MSS" were found carved into a wall in April. Some have speculated those letters might be initials for the full name "Michael Scott Speicher." Speicher's name is not in the log book. But U.S. officials are hoping to find some of the people who are listed, in the hopes that they might know something about Speicher.
Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's deputy prime minister, is now in U.S. custody and has told interrogators Speicher died after the crash of his jet in 1991. U.S. officials say they have been unable to determine whether anything Aziz says is true.
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