FOR Jim and Veronica Bowers and their two small children, the flight up the Amazon in a single-engined Cessna float plane should have been a routine return to the remote house-boat where the family lived during missionary work with Indian tribes.

It ended in 90 seconds of horror when a Peruvian air force jet guided by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractors mistook the Cessna for a drug-smuggling plane and shot it out of the sky. Veronica, 35, and her seven-month-old daughter Charity, were killed by a bullet that pierced the Cessna’s fuselage, passed through the mother’s back, and lodged in her infant’s skull.

Somehow the pilot, his legs mangled by a burst of heavy-calibre bullets, managed to crash-land on the piranha-filled river. Jim Bowers and his six-year-old son Cory watched Veronica’s body float away as they clung to the wreckage.

More than seven years after the family was shattered by a terrible mistake, the CIA has been accused in a new report of repeatedly lying to criminal investigators, members of Congress and White House officials about what happened 5,000ft above the Amazonian jungle.

“All I’ve ever asked is that they tell us the truth, and they’ve never been able to do that,” said Garnett Luttig, Veronica’s brother, at his Texas home last week.

“I’m a patriotic American, I’ve served my country, but I have to tell you this: my government stinks.”

No charges have been filed against the Peruvian air force pilot or the CIA contractors who were involved in a joint “airbridge denial” programme aimed at grounding the country’s drug lords. The operation was suspended after the Bowers incident.

The CIA has long argued that its contractors on board the Pentagon-owned surveillance aircraft that initially spotted the Bowers’s Cessna began to fear they had made a mistake and tried to call off the attack. But the Americans spoke little Spanish and had no direct communication with the fighter pilot, who spoke no English.

The release of excerpts from a classified report compiled by CIA investigators has astonished the Bowers family, shocked their congressional supporters and opened the door to yet another inquiry into the attack and into who may have participated in a cover-up.

The excerpts were released by Congressman Peter Hoekstra, who represents the Michigan constituency of the Bowers’s home church, and who is a senior member of the House intelligence committee.

“These are the most serious and substantial allegations of wrongdoing I’ve seen in my time on the committee,” said Hoekstra. He described the report as a “dark stain” on the CIA, adding: “To say these deaths did not have to happen is more than an understatement.”

The investigators’ findings remain classified, but Hoekstra said the report showed that the CIA’s Peruvian programme was “operating and being implemented outside the law”. Specific rules of engagement for attacks on suspected drug planes had been ignored in at least 10 other incidents in which planes were shot down, he said.

The report stated: “In many cases, suspect aircraft were shot down within two to three minutes of being sighted by the Peruvian fighter - without being properly identified, without being given the required warnings to land and without being given time to respond.”

It went on: “Within hours [of the Bowers attack], CIA officers began to characterise the shoot-down as a one-time mistake in an otherwise well-run programme.” In fact, this was not the case. Making matters worse, Hoekstra added, were “continuous efforts to cover the matter up and potentially block criminal investigation”.

Gloria Luttig, Veronica’s mother, was in no doubt last week what these conclusions meant. “My daughter was murdered. My granddaughter was murdered,” she said. “It should never have happened.”

Bowers has since remarried and is working as a missionary in Mozambique, where Veronica’s son Cory also lives. “I talked to him by phone on Thanksgiving Day,” said Garnett Luttig. “Cory is doing really good.”

In 2002, the US State Department paid $8m in compensation to the Bowers family and their Baptist group for the loss of lives and the plane. Legal sources said the family could be entitled to a much higher payout if CIA negligence is formally proved.

Yet for Gloria and Garnett Luttig, the money is irrelevant. “President George Bush contacted us right after this happened,” Garnett said. “He said, ‘We’ll find out what happened.’ But he never followed up. We never heard from the Peruvian government. All we’ve ever wanted is someone to tell us who killed my sister and my niece.”

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