Six Killed, Seven Injured in US Military Training Accident in Kuwait

Six Killed, Seven Injured in US Military Training Accident in Kuwait

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A US warplane participating in a joint exercise in northwestern Kuwait dropped a bomb accidentally Monday on a group of people, killing six and injuring seven others, a Kuwaiti military official said.

Colonel Ahmad Al-Rahmani, head of the Army Moral Guidance Department, said that a bomb dropped by an F-18 jet fighter at about 1630 GMT missed its original target and struck a military vehicle, killing five Americans and a New Zealander, the official Kuwait News Agency reported.

Two Kuwaitis and five Americans were injured in the accident, adding that their conditions were not known, Rahmani said.

He added that the F-18, taking off from the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman in the Gulf, was carrying out a joint exercise, dubbed "Intrinsic Action," with British and Kuwaiti warplanes near Al-Udairi firing range in the northwest of Kuwait.

Meanwhile, the news agency quoted a Pentagon source as saying in Washington that a 500-pound bomb carried by the US Navy jet fighter accidentally hit part of the firing range.

The source said that the killed were observers of the training exercise, adding that they were believed to be close to parked vehicles on the range when the bomb landed.

The source noted that U.S. forces conduct regular joint exercises with Kuwaiti military personnel every year under the US-Kuwaiti Joint Defense Pact signed after the 1991 Gulf War that liberated Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.