Four Italian soldiers die in EU peacekeeping helicopter crash in Bosnia

Four Italian soldiers were killed and 11 others injured on Thursday afternoon when a CH-47 military helicopter crashed near Brčko, in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, while serving with the European Union's EUFOR Althea peacekeeping mission. The circumstances and cause of the crash were not disclosed by either country's authorities.

Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto named the four dead soldiers by their first names only, Simone, Claudio, Franco Adriano and Laura, before travelling to Bosnia on Friday to see the survivors. He said the crash had cut short four lives while they were serving Italy, leaving four families to whom no words could give back what they had lost, and that he felt the full weight of the tragedy as a father, husband, citizen and defence minister.

Crosetto said he knew that words could not ease the pain of those living through such moments, adding that what mattered most was being present: looking people in the eye, holding their hands, listening to them and letting them know that none of them would be left alone. He described Italy's defence establishment as one family, now a wounded family, that does not forget its members and does not abandon those who suffer.

Crosetto landed at Tuzla's Dubrave International Airport on Friday morning, where Bosnian Defence Minister Zukan Helez and the chief of the Bosnian armed forces' joint staff, Lieutenant General Gojko Knežević, welcomed him, Radio Sarajevo and FENA reported. He travelled to Bosnia with Italy's chief of defence staff and a team of Italian military medical specialists, and his first stop was Tuzla's university clinical hospital, where two seriously injured soldiers are being treated.

Crosetto then travelled on to Brčko, close to the crash site, to visit nine more lightly injured personnel who are being treated there, before continuing to Sarajevo, where Bosnia's deputy defence minister, Aleksandar Goganović, and deputy joint staff chief, Major General Mirsad Ahmić, were due to receive him, according to Radio Sarajevo. In total, 11 EUFOR personnel were injured in the crash alongside the four soldiers who died.

Crosetto's ministry said an armed forces exhibition traditionally held on Rome's Circus Maximus, the Villaggio della Difesa, would take on a different meaning on Friday: rather than celebrating the armed forces, it would become a place for Italy to pause, remember the four dead by name, and symbolically embrace their families and the injured soldiers, along with everyone who has served the country and been killed or wounded over the years.