Posted 2/26/2004 5:09 AM Updated 2/26/2004 5:17 AM
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-02-26-macedonia-president_x.htm Official: Macedonia president killed in Bosnia plane crash
SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) —
Macedonia's president was killed on Thursday when his plane crashed in a mountainous part of southern Bosnia en route to an international investment conference, an official with president's party said.
Vlatko Djordjev, a spokesman for Trajkovski's party, VMRO-DPMNE, said he was told by party headquarters in Skopje that 47-year-old President Boris Trajkovski was killed in the crash.
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The weather in the area was said to be poor, and it prompted Albania's prime minister, Fatos Nano, to cancel his own flight to the conference, Nano spokesman Aldrin Dalipi said. Macedonia was to formally submit its application for eventual membership in the European Union on Thursday in Ireland, but canceled the presentation and called its delegation back from Dublin, officials said.
Trajkovski studied theology in the United States, where he gave up communism and converted from Orthodox Christianity. He was elected president in November 1999. An ordained Methodist minister, his powers were divided with those of Macedonia's prime minister. He was widely respected in Macedonia for his neutral stance in the former Yugoslav republic, where tensions persist between Macedonians and the country's ethnic Albanian minority following a 2002 war. He had called for a great inclusion of ethnic Albanians in state bodies and institutions. Trajkovski is survived by his wife and their son and daughter. Before assuming the presidency, he served as a deputy foreign minister in the center-right government of former Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski.
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