A small plane contracted by the Pentagon crashed in the South of the Philippines on Thursday, killing the four people on board, including an American army member, officials said.
The plane, a King Air 300 from Beechcraft, crashed in the municipality of Ampatuan in the province of Maguindanao del on the southern island of Mindanao, the Philippine authorities announced on Friday. He was on the way to the province of Cebu in Cotabato City, the capital of a Muslim autonomous region in Mindanao.
The incident occurred during a “routine mission in support of American-Philippine Security Cooperation Activities”, American Indo-Pacific Command said in a press release Friday.
“The plane provided intelligence, surveillance and recognition support at the request of our Philippin Allies,” the statement said. The names of the people killed were selected until family members could be informed.
The Philippines are the oldest treated ally in the United States in Asia. American troops have been deployed for years in a military camp in Mindanao to help train Filipino soldiers to fight Muslim separatist activists. In 2017, the United States’s special forces helped the Philippine army while it was putting activists linked to the Islamic State in the southern city of Marawi.
