Bad weather, human error or technical failure may have caused the air crash that killed Macedonian President Mr Boris Trajkovski, but foul play can be ruled out, officials said today.
"The possibility that the plane was shot down is absolutely excluded," Macedonian deputy public prosecutor Mr Roksanda Krstevska told reporters in the southern Bosnian city of Mostar, 15 km (10 miles) from the site of Thursday's crash.
The bodies of Trajkovski, six aides and two aircrew were being examined at the local morgue. Most were burned, she said, but if identification proved no problem they could be repatriated tomorrow.
A Macedonian government official said in Skopje that DNA analysis would be used in identifying the bodies as some of them were in a bad shape and not recognizable. "We want to be sure who we are burying," he said.
Prime Minister Mr Branko Crvenkovski would fly to Sarajevo today and continue to Mostar tomorrow, possibly also visiting the crash site, his spokesman said later.
In the Macedonian capital, mourners laid flowers and lit candles for the 47-year-old lawyer and Methodist preacher who held his country together in 2001 as an incipient ethnic civil war with Albanians threatened to tear it apart.
A state funeral was expected on Tuesday or Wednesday.