Washington ? The Navy has been unable to determine whether Capt. Michael “Scott” Speicher, the fighter pilot shot down over Iraq in January 1991, is dead or alive, but it decided to keep his official status “missing/captured” and intensify investigative efforts.

Navy Secretary Gordon England on Wednesday approved the findings and recommendations of a Navy board of inquiry, which concluded that “elements of the former Iraqi regime know the whereabouts of Captain Speicher.”

The board’s report said this conclusion was based on the fact that some years after Speicher’s F/A-18 fighter was shot down over the Iraqi desert on the opening night of the Gulf War the former Iraqi government turned over items from the aircraft and a flight suit. The report did not say who is believed to have knowledge about what happened to the pilot after he was shot down.

The Iraqi government maintained from the start that Speicher perished at the site where his F/A-18 crashed after being hit by an Iraqi air-to-air missile. No evidence to contradict that has surfaced since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, but the new Navy inquiry concluded there was no credible evidence of his death, either.

Speicher’s family lived in the Kansas City area and moved to Florida when he was a teenager.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who has followed the case for years, said in a telephone interview Thursday that investigators in Iraq obtained new leads in the Speicher case after the fall of Baghdad, including some that led them to Fallujah. But the Fallujah leads were not pursued because the city was an insurgent stronghold until last November when a major U.S. offensive returned it to U.S. and Iraqi control.

The Navy has changed its position on Speicher’s status over the years. Hours after his plane went down in the desert, the Pentagon publicly declared him killed in action. Ten years later, the Navy changed his status to missing in action, citing an absence of evidence that he had died. In October 2002, the Navy switched his status to “missing/captured,” although it has never said what evidence it had that he ever was in captivity.

Members of the Navy board of inquiry, whose report was made public Thursday, did not go to Iraq or conduct their own investigation. They considered the findings of an initial Navy inquiry in May 1991, plus a report that was filed after a search of the crash site in 1996, and subsequent Navy deliberations on the case as well as a March 2005 intelligence report based on search efforts inside Iraq after Baghdad fell in 2003.

The head of an intelligence agency POW/MIA analytical group briefed members of the Navy board of inquiry in June, but details from that briefing were not made public because the information is classified secret.

The board recommended, and England agreed, that the Pentagon should work with the State Department, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the Iraqi government to “increase the level of attention and effort inside Iraq” to resolve the question of Speicher’s fate.

Nelson said he would ask Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for details on how the Speicher will be intensified.

Among the board’s findings: “That Captain Speicher likely ejected from the aircraft and may have been captured by Iraqi forces.” Also, given that the Iraqi government turned over a flight suit and other items associated with Speicher’s aircraft years ago, the board concluded that some members of the former Saddam regime know Speicher’s whereabouts.