News-Info-Alerts

Re: Saddam Capture Revives Hopes for Speicher

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: December 20, 2003

"Saddam capture revives hope of finding US pilot missing since 1991
(AFP)
20 December 2003

TAMPA, Florida - The capture of Saddam Hussein has revived hopes that the US military might finally be able to determine what happened to Captain Michael Scott Speicher, a navy pilot who went missing during the first Gulf War.


Speicher’s jet exploded in 1991, but his fate remains a mystery.

Saddam has previously denied any knowledge of the pilot, but Speicher’s friends and his family’s lawyer believe the fallen dictator knows more than he has admitted to.

Cindy Laquidara, lawyer for Speicher’s family, said the Pentagon telephoned her shortly after Saddam’s capture and said he had been questioned about the missing pilot.

“To no one’s surprise, Hussein denied any knowledge of Speicher,” she said.

“We have complete confidence in the (Central Intelligence Agency) and the military personnel who are interrogating Saddam. We’re sure that they will give us some sort of answer to what happened to him,” Laquidara said.

Senator Bill Nelson praised the Defense Department for following up Speicher’s case.

“What I think now is that we’ve got to follow through because there is evidence that Scott Speicher has been seen as late as 1998,” he said.

Speicher, of Jacksonville, Florida, Speicher took off from the flight deck of the USS Saratoga in a F/A-18 fighter jet on January 19, 1991.

While on the bombing run, fellow pilots saw his jet burst into a fireball. At the time, the Pentagon classified him as killed in action.

But Speicher’s wife and friends doubted the official story and formed a group known as “Friends Working To Free Scott Speicher” to press the Pentagon to revisit the case.

“There were just too many questions that many of us had,” said Jim Stafford, one of Speicher’s high school classmates who now heads the group.

Speicher’s wife has since married one of his Navy friends, but she too has continued to press the Pentagon over his fate.

In 2001, the Pentagon reclassified Speicher as missing in action, based in part on the claims of an Iraqi defector who said he saw the pilot alive in 1998.

Then in October 2002, the United States said it believed Speicher was still alive and a prisoner.  The Iraq Survey Group, the massive US intelligence operation charged with piecing together happened to Iraq’s weapons programs, has been tasked with accounting for Speicher’s fate.

Hopes that he might still be alive were fueled when US invasion forces found the initials “MSS” carved into the wall of a cell at Hakmiyah prison in Baghdad.

“Without a doubt, he (Saddam Hussein) knows what happened. You don’t hold a man prisoner for nearly ten years and then just forget about him,” Laquidara said.

 © 2003 Khaleej Times"