One United States service member and three defense contractors are dead after a small airplane crashed in the Philippines on Thursday, officials said.
The aircraft was “providing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance support” at the request of allies in the Philippines, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Public Affairs said in a news release. It was a routine mission “in support of U.S.-Philippine security cooperation activities,” the command said. The service member and defense contractors were the only people aboard the plane.
The plane crashed into a rice field near Ampatuan, a small municipality in the southern Maguindanao del Sur province.
The cause of the crash is under investigation, the command said.
Windy Beaty, a provincial disaster-mitigation officer, told The Associated Press that she received reports that residents saw smoke coming from the plane and heard an explosion before the aircraft plummeted to the ground less than a kilometer (about half a mile) from a cluster of farmhouses.
Four bodies were recovered from the site. No one on the ground was injured, but a water buffalo was killed in the incident.
The service member and contractors have not yet been identified, the command said, pending standard next-of-kin notifications.
U.S. forces have been deployed in a Philippine military camp in the country’s south for decades to help provide advice and training to Filipino forces battling Muslim militants, the Associated Press reported. The region is the homeland of minority Muslims in the largely Roman Catholic nation.
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