Chinese President Jiang Zemin, while meeting with visiting Prime Minister Abdullah Bin Khalifa Al-Thani of the State of Qatar today, said that the United States must stop its reconnaissance flights in the airspace over China's coastal areas so as to prevent the recurrence of such incident. Only by doing so will it be favorable to the development of Sino-US relations. He noted that the US must take all responsibilities for the plane incident. We have sufficient evidence that it was the US plane that violated flight rules by displaying dangerous moves bumped into and destroyed our plane, and as a result the pilot is missing.

Jiang stressed that what is the most precious is human life," he said. "I am deeply concerned about the safety of the pilot and has time and again given instructions to search for and rescue the pilot at all costs.

Jiang remarked that we couldn't understand why the United States often sends its planes to make surveillance flights in areas so close to China. And this time, the US plane after bumping into our plane, intruded in Chinese territorial airspace and landed at our airport in violation of international laws and practices.