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 first Gulf War, the former Iraqi government turned over items from the aircraft and a flight suit. The report did not say who in the former government of Saddam Hussein is believed to have knowledge about what happened to the pilot after his plane was shot down.

The Iraqi government maintained from the start that Speicher died 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 inquiry concluded there was no credible evidence of his death, either.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said yesterday 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 November.

Nelson said the case should be pursued for the benefit of Speicher's family and to assure all military pilots they will not be abandoned if shot down over hostile territory.

"That was the mistake we made with Speicher," he said.

The Navy has changed its position on Speicher's status over the years. Hours after his plane went down, the Pentagon declared him killed-in-action. Ten years later, his status was changed to missing-in-action. 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 yesterday, did not go to Iraq or conduct their own investigation. They considered the findings of an initial Navy inquiry in May 1991, a report that was filed in 1996, and subsequent Navy deliberations on the case as well as a March 2005 intelligence report based on search efforts inside Iraq in 2003.