'I was told to blow-up Blair', Yugoslav general claims
The Yugoslav army's chief of staff claims he was ordered to assassinate Tony Blair in Macedonia in 1999.
General Nebojsa Pavkovic said the orders came from "the top" - an apparent reference to Slobodan Milosevic.
The commander says he was under pressure to blow up Mr Blair's helicopter at Petrovac airport in Skopje. He didn't do it because he feared civilian casualties, loss of support from Macedonia and being charged with war crimes.
Cherie Blair was with her husband on the helicopter at the time, along with chief of defence staff Sir Charles Guthrie and press secretary Alastair Campbell.
The attack was to be carried out using a multiple rocket launcher system capable of firing 288 bomblets at a time from bases in Kosovo at the airport in Macedonia.
Mr Pavkovic, who is married to a cousin of Mr Milosevic's wife, Mira, said: "We had the possibility to do it and we had the political decision to strike at the airport when Blair was coming. We knew from our intelligence sources when he was coming.
"I was under pressure to do it since Nato was destroying Yugoslavia. But since I did not have the precise possibility of monitoring the airport, my main worry was massive civilian casualties."
Mr Pavkovic is reported to have made the claims to two journalists, Dejan Lukic and Pero Simic, who plan to produce a book called Milosevic - Rise and Fall.
According to a british newspaper, Nato officials and British intelligence sources had no information at the time about the planned attack, but now consider it to have been plausible
