From The File New Doubts Over Death of Adviser By Hugo Gurdon For The London Telegraph December 4, 1997 RON Brown, President Clinton's commerce secretary who died in a plane crash in Croatia last year, seems to have had a bullet hole in his head, according to a report yesterday. Chris Ruddy, an investigative reporter at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, who has written many stories suggesting malfeasance and cover-up in the 1993 death of Vince Foster, the White House deputy counsel, says the death of Mr Brown, who was being investigated for corruption, was suspicious. He quotes Lt-Col Steve Cogswell, deputy medical examiner at the government's military pathology laboratory, as saying: "Even if you safely assumed accidental plane crash, when you have got something that appears to be a homicide, that should bring everything to a screeching halt." There was no post mortem examination of Mr Brown, but Mr Ruddy has photographs of a round, .45 calibre hole in the dead man's head, and of X-rays that may show metal fragments in the brain, consistent with a bullet breaking up. Brown's 737 crashed as it approached Dubrovnik airport in April 1996. When the US military arrived at the scene, Croatian soldiers were already there, and there is evidence that the site had been looted. "The most disturbing thing is the assumption that it was an accident before American investigators even got to the scene," Mr Ruddy said.     | List of Articles |