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The remains of Navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher have returned to his Florida home, 18 years after his FA-18 Hornet was shot down on the first night of the Gulf War in 1991.

Navy pilot Michael "Scott" Speicher was shot down over the Iraq desert on the first night of the Gulf War in 1991, and it was there he apparently was buried by Bedouins, the sand hiding him from the world's mightiest military. For nearly two decades, the family Speicher left behind, from outside Jacksonville, Fla., pushed the Defense Department to find out what had happened to him. On Sunday, the Pentagon disclosed that Marines had recovered Speicher's bones and skeletal fragments — enough for a positive identification. Shot down over west-central Iraq on a combat mission in his FA-18 Hornet on...

Barbara Novak remembers her big brother as an easygoing, good-humored guy who pushed her on a swing set and hoisted her on his shoulders when he came home on military leave. "He was like a lot of young men at the time -- he wanted to serve his country," said Novak, 64, who lives in Livermore. "He had a lot of pride, and we were all very proud of him." But on July 12, 1950, Pvt. Nicholas John Hansinger, a medic in the Korean War, was captured and marched to a prison camp in North Korea, where he apparently died...

A Navy pilot shot down over Iraq in January 1991 may have been captured by Iraqi forces, and members of the former Iraqi government "know the whereabouts" of the officer, the Navy has concluded. A Navy board of inquiry concluded that there is no credible evidence that Capt. Michael "Scott" Speicher is dead, and it reaffirmed his official status as "missing/captured," according to the board's final report. The board also recommended that the Pentagon work with the State Department, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the Iraqi government to "increase the level of attention and effort inside Iraq" to resolve...

WASHINGTON: Lt Michael Speicher, a US Navy pilot whose plane was downed in Iraq in 1991, was dead, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said yesterday. The pilot's fate after the downing of his F18 on January 16 1991 has been the subject of conflicting reports. The Washington Post, quoting US Senate investigation sources, said in June he was still alive. "An American team in [the] mid-'90s came with the help of the Iraqi authorities and with the presence of the Red Cross," Mr Aziz told CNN yesterday. "They checked the site where his plane crashed, and they concluded that...