Initials on prison wall may be from US pilot

Three letters scratched on the wall of a Baghdad prison have revived a 12-year mystery: might the missing US navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher, shot down on the first night of the Gulf War in 1991, still be alive in an Iraqi prison? The tantalising new hint came when a US search team found the inscription MSS, in Latin script, carved in a cell in the Hakmiyah prison, where an informant regarded as reliable by the CIA has suggested an American pilot was held in the mid-1990s.

In Washington, officials were wary of hailing the find as proof Lieutenant-Commander Speicher had been alive at the time – or even that the letters were linked to him. They were found with another apparent set of initials, MJN.

But a lawyer for his family called the news "heartening" and grounds for hope. "There's a lot of information indicating that Scott is alive and in captivity," the lawyer, Cindy Laquidara, said.

Lt-Cdr Speicher took off in his F-18 from the aircraft carrier Saratoga in the Gulf for a bombing mission on 17 January 1991, the first night of the war to drive Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait. But while his group was over Iraq, the pilot of another F-18 saw a flash and lost sight of Lt-Cdr Speicher's plane.

The next morning, the Pentagon announced that the aircraft had been shot down by an Iraqi missile and – a few months afterwards – classified the pilot as killed in action. Years later, his flight suit was found at the crash site in the desert, suggesting the serviceman might have been taken prisoner. Accordingly, the Pentagon changed his classification to "missing in action, captured".

If Lt-Cdr Speicher is found alive, his homecoming will be complicated.

With her husband presumed dead, Lt-Cdr Speicher's wife remarried his best friend – just as happened in the 2001 film Pearl Harbour.