Earhart 'died on Pacific atoll'

MORE THAN 60 years after the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared without trace over the Pacific on a round-the-world flight, American researchers believe they are close to cracking the mystery of where and how she died.

Armed with new evidence, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar), based in Delaware, says Earhart and her navigator, Frederick J Noonan, almost certainly crashed on the atoll of Nikumaroro. They died either of thirst or starvation when rescue efforts failed to find them.

The group believes that key evidence in the case was dug up by the British colonial administration in the Western Pacific in 1940, three years after the crash, but was kept from public attention because of scientific incompetence and an insistence by the High Commission to keep the affair secret.

According to the Commission's files, the British administrator charged with governing Nikumaroro discovered fragments of shoes, a sextant box and some human bones, which made him think of Earhart.

Richard Gillespie of Tighar said: "Anything we discover is bound to be controversial. But just because we are criticised doesn't mean our evidence has been disproved."

What is still missing is conclusive proof. The most compelling piece of evidence would be the bones, but nobody knows where they are.