Following my article reporting the death of Macedonian president Boris Trajkovski on Antiwar.com yesterday, new aspects of the story are surfacing, some of which I have linked to near the end of this post.

The charred bodies of all those killed have finally been found, notwithstanding the fact that the plane crashed in high mountains and in the middle of a minefield left over from the Bosnian War. The point is already being made that the plane transporting Trajkovski was in age and quality more akin to the one that killed Buddy Holly than it was to Air Force 1.

SO… you can bet that a debate is going to break out in Skopje, especially after a former foreign minister said that the 26 year-old plane in question almost killed him once over Romania and would have been grounded long ago, except for public outcry over the expenses associated with giving the president something better than a WWI biplane.

On another subject, a Reality Macedonia piece decrying BBC propaganda seems to have produced a reaction: the website home page also has new updates on the tragedy.

This and the more egregious example of CNN’s creative approach to Macedonian history are discussed in my website’s commentary from last night, “Eulogizing Trajkovski, or the West?”

That article questioned whether mass media coverage of the tragedy had erred, in that it almost exclusvely relied on quoted condolensces from Western officials — and not from the Macedonians whom elected Trajkovski in the first place. Therefore we have tried to go a small way towards redressing that oversight by translating from the Macedonian language the thoughts and reactions of ordinary people in Macedonia.