New Hope for Missing Gulf War Pilot?

April 10 -- There is hope that the mystery of what happened to Capt. Michael "Scott" Speicher, a U.S. Navy pilot whose plane was shot down on the first night of the 1991 Gulf War, could be resolved now that coalition forces are taking control of Baghdad.

U.S. military sources say the increasing access to Baghdad is opening parts of the city to those who work full-time to determine what happened to Speicher, who was listed as killed in action for nearly 10 years before his status was revised to Missing in Action by the Department of the Navy in January 2001.

Late last year, the Navy revised his status again, declaring him Missing/Captured.

Speicher, of Jacksonville, Fla., then 33, was shot down over Iraq, north of Baghdad, on Jan. 17, 1991 during an air battle with an Iraqi fighter. He was the first American lost in the war and the last still unaccounted for.

As coalition forces have advanced through Iraq towards Baghdad over the last three weeks, there have been U.S. personnel in Iraq who are focused on looking for evidence of what happened to Speicher, military sources said.

Officials are particularly interested in the seizure of the notorious Rashid Prison, a facility that "features highly in the way the Iraqi military handles their prisoners," one official said.

However, there is "not first-hand information that Speicher was through Rashid Prison," the official said.

Iraqis are believed to have had a sophisticated system for handling their POWs, making this prison a possible goldmine of documentation and other evidence that could solve the decade-old Speicher mystery.

Over the years, and recently, tipsters have told the United States that Speicher is alive and being held in Iraq, and these leads have kept hope alive for a few lawmakers, military officials and other true believers — particularly his family — who are convinced he is alive.

The United States has always insisted that at the very least, Saddam Hussein knows what happened to Speicher.