Four Italians Killed as EUFOR Helicopter Goes Down in Bosnia

A helicopter of the European Union's military mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina has crashed, and the force has confirmed that four Italian nationals were killed. Al Jazeera reported that EUFOR identified the aircraft as a CH-47 Chinook and that the dead were Italian. The report carried no location for the crash, no account of its cause and no names.

EUFOR is the EU's own military operation in Bosnia, the force that succeeded the NATO-led deployment which followed the war of the 1990s. It flies transport aircraft in support of a mission that has been in place for years under a United Nations mandate. The wire account did not say how many people were aboard the Chinook, whether others were hurt, or what the flight was doing.

Italy has for years been among the European countries supplying personnel to EU and NATO missions in the western Balkans, a region directly across the Adriatic. Four dead in a European airframe therefore reaches Rome as a defence and foreign-policy matter and not only as an aviation accident. The report did not say whether the Italian defence ministry had commented.