By EFE
Aug 27, 2023, 12:32 PM EDT
Three members of the US Navy died this Sunday in Australia after a military plane in which they were traveling with twenty other occupants crashed during exercises on an island in the north of the country, official sources reported.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expressed regret in a statement that three American soldiers lost their lives on Melville Island in the Tiwi archipelago and expressed his “deepest thoughts and condolences.”
The president explained that the Australian armed forces in the Northern Territory, where the tragedy occurred, have been deployed to help their US allies, calling the incident “regrettable.”
The Osprey plane crashed on the island with 23 occupants on board, all of them Americans.
“Five marines have been sent to Darwin for treatment while the rest have been operated on site. Additional Police and Defense personnel have been deployed to Melville Island to support operations, intervene with injured people and return them to Darwin,” Northern Territory Police Inspector Michael Murphy told the media.
The largest hospital in the Northern Territory, in Darwin, activated its maximum emergency code to treat the injured.
The Osprey, an aircraft capable of taking off vertically like a helicopter, suffered the accident during the Predators Run military exercises, led jointly by the Australian and United States armies with more than 2,500 soldiers from both countries and the Philippines, East Timor and Indonesia.
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