:strip_icc():format(jpeg)/kly-media-production/medias/1696996/original/026126600_1539514260-f35_4.jpg "April 17, 2002: No orders, US fighter pilots drop bombs instead and kill 4 Canadian soldiers")
Liputan6.com, Kandahar – American fighter pilots “accidentally” drop bombs and kill four Canadian soldiers and wound eight others. April 17, 2002 will be remembered as a day full of sorrow.
Fatal, it is the first death of a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan, as well as the first death in a combat zone since the Korean War of 1950-1953.
Launch Radio Canada InternationalOn Monday (4/17/2023), the evening of April 17, members of 3 Billion Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) Princess Patricia were conducting range practice at a location known as “Cattle Farm.”
The place is a former 100-acre walled agricultural cooperative. Several one- and two-story mud-brick buildings stood there. Located approximately 15 kilometers from Kandahar airfield and base in southern Afghanistan.
Tarnak Farm was a training area known as the place where all coalition forces trained.
Information on night exercises to be carried out later in the day was also disseminated to other members of the coalition.
As exercises began that night, two American F-16 pilots returned to Kuwait after a six-hour flight over northern Afghanistan.
At 23,000 feet (7,000 m), the fighter pilots saw the flash from the practice arena below them and mistook it for ground-to-air gunfire.
One of them decided to fly lower to have a closer look, he also asked the AWACS controller if he could comb the area with 20mm cannon fire.
Supervisors asked him to wait, as did his co-pilot.
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