TWO-STAR general among eight Marine Corps officers charged in Osprey falsification case

Friday, August 17th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ A two-star general is among the eight Marine Corps officers charged with misconduct in the alleged falsification of maintenance records for the MV-22 Osprey aircraft, officials said Friday.

Maj. Gen. Dennis T. Krupp, commanding general of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, is charged with dereliction of duty on grounds that he knew or should have known of the falsification, they said.

The announcement was made by Marine Forces Atlantic headquarters in Norfolk, Va. The commanding general there, Lt. Gen. Raymond P. Ayres, Jr., notified the eight officers of the charges against them last week, but their identities were not made public until Friday.

Ayres gave the eight until Friday to decide whether to appear before him for administrative hearings to answer the charges or to ask to move ahead with the first step in court-martial proceedings to challenge the allegations.

Ayres said all eight chose to attend the hearings and not seek a public airing of the evidence against them.

He said the date of the hearings has not been set. The charges against the eight stem from allegations received by senior Marine Corps leaders in January that officers in the Marine Medium Tiltrotor Training Squadron, based at New River, N.C., had ordered the doctoring of maintenance records for the Osprey to exaggerate its performance record.

At the time, the Pentagon was on the verge of deciding whether to go ahead with full-rate production of the Osprey.

Two crashes in 2000 had raised serious questions about the reliability of the aircraft, although the Pentagon's inspector general later concluded that the alleged falsification of records at New River had nothing to do with either crash.