Bad weather, human error or technical failure may have caused the air crash that killed Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski, but foul play can be ruled out, officials said on Saturday.
"The possibility that the plane was shot down is absolutely excluded," Macedonian deputy public prosecutor 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 on Sunday.
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 recognisable. "We want to be sure who we are burying," he said.
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.
"Our civil aviation authorities will today listen to a conversation taped between the plane and the control tower in Mostar," Krstevska added. Bosnian officials have already heard the pilot's last communications but have said nothing.
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