The wreckage of a U.S. Air Force plane glinted from a rocky hill above Dubrovnik Friday as helicopters finished picking up the black body bags containing the remains of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and other crash victims.
Nearby at the city's Cilipi Airport, Robert Taft, deputy assistant secretary of commerce, arrived to view the bodies at a makeshift morgue.Thirty-five people died Wednesday when the military plane slammed into the coastal hillside during a violent storm. Among them were Brown, 10 Commerce Department colleagues, a CIA analyst, 12 American business executives, a New York Times correspondent, a Bosnian interpreter and a Croat photographer.
Defense Secretary William Perry said initial speculation was that faulty instrumentation was to blame.
Clouds that had rolled low over this historic port city finally parted Friday, with sunshine spotlighting the wreckage above the blue-green waters of the Adriatic.
Seven helicopters with the NATO-led peace forces in neighboring Bosnia were used to recover the 35 bodies and to deliver them to the temporary morgue in a cavernous airport warehouse.
U.S. military personnel were trying to identify the bodies, taking fingerprints where possible and checking personal belongings, military spokesman Mark Brzozowski said.
After identification, the bodies will be shipped to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Before they leave, there will be "a short, dignified ceremony, the sort we do whether the media is here or not when we send back our comrades," said one military official.
The service, attended by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith, will be held Saturday, the official said. Within 36 hours afterward, two U.S. Air Force C-17s were to fly the bodies of the 33 Americans back to the United States.
In Washington, President Clinton led a prayer service at St. John's Episcopal, the church of presidents across from the White House. It was a sun-dappled spring day, the cherry blossoms in bloom, but the mood was dark at the White House and in federal offices. Flags flew at half-staff around the nation's capital.
Clinton noted that Thursday was 28 years to the day since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in Memphis, Tenn., another leader who struggled for a cause, just, he said, as Brown and his entourage wanted to rebuild Bosnia.
"Our colleagues . . . who died outside Dubrovnik were answering a very important challenge of this time," Clinton said at the service.
Later, he and the first lady planted a tree on the White House grounds in memory of Brown.
Croatia observed a day of mourning Friday, with flags flying at half-staff. State radio played somber music, theater performances were canceled and sports events were ordered to observe a minute's silence for the victims.
President Tudjman spoke late Thursday of his nation's grief at the loss of life, and the lost chance to create new business ties with the United States.
Perry, who used the same plane only days earlier on a Balkan tour, told reporters on his way back to Washington from Egypt that the hill where the plane hit was "offset" to the north of the airfield.
"It was a classic sort of an accident that good instrumentation should be able to prevent," he said. No problems had been reported on the flight, and it had been cleared to land.
A senior Air Force official, who spoke Thursday on condition of anonymity, said Brown's plane was fitted with a ground proximity warning system that should have sounded an alarm as the plane neared the hillside.
But depending on the speed of the plane and the amount of room for maneuver, there may not have been enough time to respond.