BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 22, 2005 - 

At 2 p.m. Thursday, a Bulgarian-owned Mi-8 transport helicopter was shot down near the town of Taji, 12 miles northwest of Baghdad, with 11 men aboard. There were three Bulgarian crew members; six Americans working for the security company Blackwater USA, under contract to the United States Diplomatic Security Service; and two Fijian former soldiers employed as door-gunners.

Initially, the United States military command announced that there were no survivors from the crash, the first shootdown of a commercial helicopter in the two-year-old war.

But as investigators combed through the wreckage on Friday and transported the bodies to the American base at Balad, north of Baghdad, the story took a cruel twist. A video posted on the Internet by the Islamic Army in Iraq, an insurgent group that has claimed responsibility for a succession of attacks in recent months, included a sequence that showed the execution of a survivor from the crash.

On Friday, the man shown being shot was identified as Lyubomir Kostov, a pilot on the downed craft. Mihail Mihailov, manager of Heli-Air Services, the Bulgarian company that owned the helicopter, said Mr. Kostov was the company's chief pilot, The Associated Press reported. Heli-Air operated the helicopter for SkyLink Air and Logistic Support, a Toronto-based company that chartered the aircraft.

An Islamic Army statement posted in mosques in Anbar Province on Friday claimed that the helicopter had been shot down with a Soviet-made Strela heat-seeking missile by an attacker who had waited three days on a rise in the desert for a chance to fire on a foreign aircraft.

A senior American military officer in Iraq confirmed that the helicopter was hit by a missile and that American investigators were investigating the wreckage in an attempt to determine what kind of missile was used.

The officer said the attacker had either been lucky in stationing himself near the helicopter's flight path, or there had been "detailed reconnaissance" by the insurgents.

Low-flying helicopters do much of the transport for military personnel and foreign civilians across Iraq, avoiding dangerous roads. The Bulgarian aircraft was flying from Baghdad's Green Zone, the American command compound, to an American base in Tikrit, along a heavily flown route that passes near Taji, an insurgent stronghold.

The end for the man identified as Mr. Kostov came quickly.

When the video surveyed the helicopter wreckage, showing two charred bodies, one with a pistol holster strapped to his thigh, one of the insurgents could be heard saying in Arabic, referring to the bodies, "Look at this filth," and "God is great!" He quickly added, "See if there are any Americans left."

About 300 yards away, across the stony desert, a stretch of tall grass was visible. It was there the attackers found the pilot.

The man in the dark blue flight suit lay face-up in the tall scrub grass looking up nervously at the video camera. Above him stood men with Kalashnikov rifles who had tracked him down to the only cover near where his helicopter had been shot down in the desert.

"Stand up! Stand up!" a voice in Arab-accented English said from off-camera. "I can't. It's broken," the man in the flight suit answered, also in English, with a soft Eastern European accent. The man, in his 40's, with graying hair, raised his head slightly as he spoke and motioned to his right leg. "Give me a hand," he said. "Come here, come here," the off-camera insurgent said, reaching out a hand to pull him up.

"Silah? Silah?" -- "Any weapons?" -- the insurgent asked after hauling the pilot to his feet. Mr. Kostov, seeming not to understand Arabic, gave no answer. "Go! Go!" the insurgent said in English.

As the pilot hobbled forward, the insurgent intoned what amounted to a death sentence. "Carry out God's judgment," he said, just as the pilot turned around, raising his right hand in a protective gesture. Eighteen shots followed, with Mr. Kostov falling backward into the grass, dust plumes around him as the bullets struck.