KABUL, May 6: Ten US soldiers were killed when a coalition helicopter involved in an anti-Taliban combat operation crashed in eastern Afghanistan, the US military said on Saturday.

“The remains of 10 soldiers were on board the aircraft that crashed last night. There were no survivors,” said a spokeswoman for the US-led military coalition, Lt Tamara Lawrence.

Lawrence said all the soldiers killed in the crash in eastern Kunar province were American. Details of the dead would be released by the Pentagon, she said.

Another 15 US soldiers have died in Afghanistan this year, 13 of them in hostile action. Four died on March 12 when a roadside bomb ripped through their convoy in Kunar.

Friday’s toll was the biggest in one incident since Taliban militants shot down another US Chinook helicopter in Kunar in June last year, killing all 16 soldiers on board, eight of them US Navy SEALs.

Two months before that a US military helicopter crashed in bad weather in the southeast of the country, killing all 18 Americans on board, including 15 service members in the worst helicopter crash during operations in Afghanistan.

The US-led coalition said the chopper that crashed on Friday was not brought down by enemy action, rejecting a claim by Taliban insurgents that they had shot it down.

“The crash occurred in a very mountainous terrain and the landing zone was very difficult. It was a mountain-top landing zone,” Lawrence said.—AFP