All four soldiers on board were killed in the crash of a US NATO plane in Norway on Friday evening. The police of the northern town of Nordland announced this on Saturday morning, Reuters news agency reported. According to the police, all four soldiers who died were American nationals. It is not clear whether the exercise was related to the war in Ukraine.
The soldiers were on a NATO exercise with the American aircraft, an MV-22 Osprey, when they went missing around 6:30 p.m. Friday evening. The plane was flying in a northerly direction, according to Norwegian rescue services. It is not clear how the accident could have happened. It may have to do with the bad weather conditions: the Norwegian rescue services reported Friday evening that these were “challenging” and “expected to deteriorate.”
Just after 9 p.m. on Friday evening, rescue services saw the crashed aircraft from the air. Due to the bad weather, it would not have been possible to go to the aircraft itself at that time. That was possible later in the night, after which the police “unfortunately were able to determine that all four on board the plane died,” said Ivar Bo Nilsson, the chief of police in the Norwegian province of Nordland.
