China abandons hope for fighter pilot

Pentagon officials believe these images were taken by a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane crew member and e-mailed home a few days before the incident:   Based upon this jet's ID number, Pentagon officials believe this photo shows Chinese pilot Wang Wei, who was killed when his jet collided with a U.S. Navy surveillance flight     ON THE NEWS Martin Savidge: Debriefing and celebrations in store for home-bound crew

In this story: Hero 'Very sorry' Homecoming ceremony Sensitive equipment Beijing eases back RELATED STORIES, SITES

BEIJING, China -- A heroes' welcome-home was awaiting the U.S. spy plane crew as China ended the search for its own hero, the pilot of the fighter jet that collided with the spy plane.

Rhetoric continued to flow on both sides as a prelude to a meeting, probably in Beijing on Wednesday, between the United States and China. The spy plane remains in China's possession with no indication yet as to what might happen to it.

By charging that missing Chinese fighter pilot Wang Wei caused the mid-air collision which sparked the deadlock between the two countries, Washington was seeking excuses, a Chinese spokesman said on Saturday.

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But Washington backed its contention of Wang's aggression by releasing old video footage showing his F-8 fighter flying within feet of a U.S. surveillance aircraft.

Several hours later, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that the intense search for Wang Wei ended at 6 p.m. Saturday. Wang has not been seen since bailing out after the April 1 collision with the spy plane.

Hero

State media lionized Wang as a hero of national defense. China's navy launched what it said was its biggest search ever to find him, using military and fishing boats and aircraft to comb 292,300 square miles of tropical ocean.

Earlier, Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said the old U.S. video proved nothing and Washington was just trying to evade responsibility for the incident, which forced the EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft to make an emergency landing on China's Hainan Island.

"The U.S. side should take a co-operative attitude and not seek excuses to evade responsibility," Sun said.

"I cannot see what the pictures prove. The details will be discussed within the scope of the negotiations."

'Very sorry'

Officials of the two countries are due to meet on Wednesday to discuss the incident, less than a week after the 24 crew members of the U.S. plane were freed.

They were flown to Hawaii soon after Washington said it was "very sorry" the American plane had entered Chinese airspace and landed without permission and for the loss of the Chinese pilot.

Since the American crew, who included three women, landed back on U.S. soil, Washington has insisted loudly that the collision between the fighter and the lumbering U.S. turboprop was Wang's fault.

The crew of the surveillance plane will return to their home base at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington Saturday to a heroes' welcome.

"Right now we envision a two-part ceremony," said Capt. Larry Salter, Whidbey Naval Air Station's chief executive officer.

Homecoming ceremony

"The first part will be the homecoming, the coming off of the airplane, the reuniting of the families, and we expect that to take some number of minutes.

"Then we'll kind of pause and reshuffle a little bit and then get into the formal ceremony."

China has not denied earlier contentions by anonymous U.S. officials that Wang was flying close to the spy plane. But it has said the EP-3 veered suddenly into his plane, hitting it and forcing him to bail out into the South China Sea.

The tough words which have poured out of Washington since the EP-3 crew flew home are likely to carry into Wednesday's meeting between the two countries, which is likely to be held in Beijing.

China has made plain that stopping U.S. surveillance flights off its coast is at the top of the Beijing agenda for the meeting.

Sensitive equipment

Washington has made it equally clear that its priority is the return of the $80 million spy plane, which officials there assume the Chinese have examined thoroughly, although they say the crew destroyed much of the most sensitive equipment.

In the U.S. capital on Friday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that Wang was deliberately harassing the EP-3 crew.

"The F-8 pilot clearly put at risk the lives of 24 Americans," Rumsfeld said during a Pentagon news conference. "It was clear the pilot's intent was to harass the crew."

Wang Wei

Rumsfeld said he did not believe the Chinese pilot deliberately ran into the U.S. EP-3.

"You've got to know that no pilot intentionally takes his horizontal stabilizer and sticks it in the propeller of an EP-3," Rumsfeld said. "He did not mean to do that, I am certain of that."

During the news conference, Rumsfeld showed video taken from a U.S. aircraft that showed -- based on its number -- the same Chinese aircraft that struck the EP-3 flying very close to the U.S. plane.

Beijing eases back

China abruptly eased up its campaign of anti-U.S. rhetoric on Saturday, with state-run media featuring instead the anniversary of a long-dead Communist revolutionary.

Apart from a handful of human-interest reports about the pilot's family and articles claiming broad public support for Beijing's decision to release the detained crew of the spy plane, there were few mentions of the incident that had so inflamed China-U.S. tensions.

State-run television news devoted most of its attention to President Jiang Zemin's visit to Cuba, part of a 12-day Latin American tour that has kept him abroad during most of the crisis over the spy plane collision.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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