RAF tornado brought down by US Patriot missiles

An RAF Tornado jet was shot down today by a US Patriot missile battery as it overflew the Iraq-Kuwait border while returning from a mission.

There was no word on the fate of the British crew and no information on their numbers, said Group Captain Al Lockwood, spokesman for British forces in the Gulf.

“We’re looking now for the evidence of the aircraft’s crash site and obviously the crew members,” he said.

The Tornado GR4, based in Marham, Norfolk, was returning from an operational mission early today and was engaged by the missile battery, said a statement from the British press information centre at US Central Command.

Earlier US military officials said a Patriot missile battery may have downed the plane.

When asked why a Patriot missile battery would have brought down an allied plane, Group Captain Lockwood noted that the Patriot system is designed to intercept everything above it from incoming ballistic missiles to low-flying cruise missiles.

“We wish to find out just as everybody else does – the US as well – why this happened. And we will be carrying out a joint investigation to determine the facts so that we can eliminate this problem forever,” he said.

He said the Americans were “just as concerned as we are that this has occurred.”

Some 45,000 British military personnel are in the Persian Gulf fighting along with the US-led attack against Iraq.

In the four days since the war began, 14 British and seven American servicemen have been killed.

Six British troops and a US Navy officer died on Saturday when two Royal Navy helicopters from the carrier Ark Royal collided over the Gulf.

Another helicopter crash on Friday claimed the lives of eight British and four US Marines. The CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter crashed and burned about nine miles south of the Iraqi border town of Umm Qasr. Military officials said no hostile fire was reported in the area.

Group Captain Lockwood acknowledged the bad start to the campaign, saying it was “not one we would have chosen, I have to say, but this you must remember is high-intensity conflict. This is war and it’s not training.”

“We will continue to do our job and see it to its finish,” he said.

Both the Gulf War and Afghanistan saw US and allied troop casualties from friendly fire. In the 1991 Gulf War, 4% of allied losses – which included 35 of the 148 Americans killed – were from what the military also calls “fratricide.”

Nine British soldiers were killed in Iraq in the 1991 conflict when two American A-10 aircraft mistakenly fired on their armoured personnel carriers. A US military investigation concluded that the pilots had mistaken the Britons for an Iraqi target 13 miles to the east.