LONDON, March 23: A British Royal Air Force plane shot down over the Gulf by a US Patriot missile was a Tornado fighter-bomber, Foreign Office minister Mike O’Brien said.
“Sadly it does sound like there has been a number of terrible events, including the one we heard about this morning with the Tornado shot down near the Kuwaiti border,” he told BBC Radio Five Live.
“That looks like a friendly fire incident by a US Patriot missile, but the details are being investigated,” he added.
Earlier, a US military official with the US Central Command in Qatar confirmed that the plane was hit by a Patriot and that the crew was missing.
The Tornado carries two crew members.
The GR4 model currently in operation saw considerable action in the last Gulf War of 1991.
GRENADE ATTACK: A US soldier guarding grenades at a camp in Kuwait killed one colleague and wounded 12 others on Sunday when he lobbed explosives into tents of sleeping officers, officials and witnesses said.
The unnamed soldier, who is believed to be a sergeant, was shot in the leg and detained after the 1:30 am (2230 GMT Saturday) attack at Camp Pennsylvania where members of the 101st Airborne Division were camped out in the desert as part of the US-led war in neighbouring Iraq.
Sky News correspondent Stuart Ramsay, who was embedded with the unit, said there were scenes of panic with troops fearing they had come under an attack from the Iraqis.
“They all thought it was a land attack and took up battle positions around their tents,” Ramsay said.
“They put on their night sights and were fully armed.”
The soldier appeared to have thrown grenades into at least three tents where the unit’s officers were sleeping, with the casualties suffering shrapnel wounds.
One military source said that the grenades had been lobbed or rolled into tents in the brigade tactical center, where officers order and plan operations.
Thirteen men were initially injured in the attack. Two were released after treatment at the scene while the other 11 were transferred to field hospitals but one was later pronounced dead, spokesman Major David Andersen said.
Panic-stricken troops first began looking for two Kuwaitis but suspicion fell on the arrested man when it was discovered that “there were four grenades missing from his area,” said Time magazine correspondent Jim Lacey, who was also embedded with the unit.
The soldier was first shot in the leg and then forced to the ground at gunpoint before a blanket was thrown over his head.
Army spokesman Max Blumenfeld confirmed that a soldier was currently being questioned by the army’s Criminal Investigation Division.
“The suspect is a soldier assigned to the division,” Blumenfeld said.
Lacey told CNN that the soldier, with “an Arabic-sounding last name”, had recently been disciplined for insubordination.
His superior officers had decided to leave him behind when the unit advanced into Iraq, according to Lacey.
road accident: One US soldier was killed and another was injured in a road accident in southern Iraq on Sunday, the US military’s forward command headquarters in Qatar said.
“There are no indications that hostile fire was a factor in the incident,” the command center said in a statement.
The soldiers were part of the US Army’s Third Infantry Division.
US and British forces have now sustained an officially confirmed 23 fatalities since the start of the war on Iraq early on Thursday March 20.—AFP
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