Friendly fire kills two UK tank crew
Rory McCarthy in Camp as-Sayliya, Qatar, and agencies
Wednesday March 26, 2003
The Guardian
Two members of a British tank crew were killed and two critically injured after their Challenger 2 tank was fired on by another Challenger tank in southern Iraq. A single tank round took the turret off the tank in the misdirected attack, which happened on Monday in pitch darkness.
The two dead men were members of the Queen’s Royal Lancers, part of the First Royal Regiment of Fusiliers battle group. They were named as Corporal Stephen Allbutt, 35, from Stoke-on-Trent, and Trooper David Clarke, 19, from Littleworth, Staffordshire.
“The soldiers were tragically killed in a ‘friendly fire’ incident during a period of multiple engagements from enemy forces on the outskirts of Basra,” Colonel Chris Vernon, a British military spokesman, said.
“Regardless of the careful planning and measures taken in the type of operations in which we are engaged and in the heat of battle there is always a risk that incidents such as this might happen.”
The army would not say whether the tank which fired the shot was from the same regiment.
Col Vernon said an investigation was under way into the accident, the first in recent years in which British forces have been killed in error. It will centre on why the tank’s sophisticated new identification technology failed to prevent the attack.
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