Official Questions Death of Macedonia's Trajkovski

While refusing to disclose what exactly led him to this possible conclusion, Gross, who is preparing a PACE report on the accident, said for Deutsche Welle Macedonian language programme that this evidence will soon be made public.

“It is my personal conviction, I am convinced that it is about a murder, and I base this on new information about which I do not want to speak about yet. This personal claim is based also on knowledge about unbelievable contradictions which logically lead to murder hypotheses,” Gross repeated, speaking at the latest session of PACE yesterday, Macedonian MIA news agency reported.

Gross said he will soon visit Macedonia to consult with the individuals who found the new information.

According to him, the blame for Trajkovski's death "should be sought in the West, not in the East".

Gross also announced a new second report on the crash of the plane carrying President Boris Trajkovski. He added that if he fails to collect all evidence by June, when his mandate ends in PACE, he will request a continuation of the mandate.

Trajovski and his entourage died in 2004 when the president's plane tried to land at the airport in Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina amid bad weather. Speculations about the cause of his death spread almost immediately after the tragedy.

Some pointed to the extensive amount of time that was needed to find the wreckage, others suspected the Mostar control tower, which at the time was run by French military personnel, was to blame, and there were persons who suspected his rivals at home might have arranged his death.

However, the official investigation showed that the aircraft prematurely descended from the standard landing path, causing it to crash in the nearby hills.