Soviet officer who 'shot down McCain over Vietnam' speaks out

An ex-Soviet officer who claims to have shot down U.S. Senator John McCain's plane over Vietnam in 1967 has said he is happy the ex-navy pilot lost his bid for the White House, a Russian paper said on Monday.

McCain was shot down over Hanoi while on a bombing mission on October 26, 1967, and taken captive by the North Vietnamese. He spent five and a half years in a POW camp, and claims that he was tortured. His time in captivity left him unable to raise his hands above his head.

Although McCain's former Vietnamese prison guards have said that they have forgiven him for his bombing raids, and that they even rooted for him in the U.S. presidential elections, 70-year-old Yury Trushyekin has no such warm feelings.

"It's good that he didn't become president. Even in the camp they said how he really hated Russians, as he knew it was our missile that shot him down," Trushyekin told the MK v Pitere paper. "Russian-American relations would have suffered, that's for sure."

There has never been any official acknowledgement that Soviet soldiers served in Vietnam on the side of the communist North Vietnamese in the 1960s and 1970s. However, Trushyekin, currently in a hospital in Russia's second city of St. Petersburg, had no qualms about speaking about his time in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

"I got to Vietnam at the time when there were mixed units with Vietnamese," he said, adding that he had served as an officer in a missile unit.

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