U.S. Missile Kills 2 British Pilots

A U.S. Patriot missile battery shot down a British fighter plane Sunday near the Iraqi border with Kuwait, killing the two fliers on board, the British military said.

The RAF Tornado GR4 was returning to Kuwait from air attacks that destroyed Republican Guard forces outside Baghdad, U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said in Qatar.

A statement from the Royal Air Force base at Marham, in Britain, confirmed the two crewmembers were dead. It did not identify them.

"They were returning from one of many successful and professionally conducted missions in Iraq, and I would like to pay tribute to their expertise and dedication," Wing Commander Mike Oldham of Britain's Marham base said in a statement.

The downing was the first confirmed "friendly fire" death in the U.S.-led war on Iraq and was a blow to British forces. Fourteen other British servicemen have died in two accidents during the war - the crash of a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter and a mid-air collision of two British Royal Navy helicopters. Five Americans were also killed in those incidents.

Oldham said the crew's families had been notified and an investigation was underway. The statement gave no further details.

The Tornado was returning from an operational mission early Sunday and "was engaged near the Kuwaiti border by a Patriot missile battery," the British press information center at U.S. Central Command in Qatar said in a statement.

Britain has sent some 45,000 military personnel to the Persian Gulf to join nearly 300,000 Americans deployed against Iraq. British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said "an enormous amount of effort" had been spent on fitting the best possible protection against "friendly fire."

"But there is no single technological solution to this problem. It is about having a whole set of procedures in place. Sadly on this occasion they have not worked," he told British Broadcasting Corp. television.

Asked how a U.S. missile could have brought down the plane, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told ABC's "This Week" that "procedures and electronic means to identify friendly aircraft and to identify adversary aircraft ... broke down somewhere."

"Central Command is looking into that as we speak. Again, it's a terrible tragedy and our hearts go out to the crew members," Myers told ABC.

Group Capt. Al Lockwood, spokesman for British forces in the Gulf, noted that the Patriot missile is designed to intercept everything above it from incoming ballistic missiles to low-flying cruise missiles.

"We wish to find out just as everybody else does, the U.S. as well, why this happened. And we will be carrying out a joint investigation to determine the facts so that we can eliminate this problem forever," he said.

"I have to say it is not the beginning that we would have preferred," Lockwood said. "But this you must remember is high-intensity conflict. This is war and it's not training."

"We will continue to do our job and see it to its finish," he said.