ZAMBOANGA CITY (Mindanao Examiner / 19 Feb) – A U.S. soldier participating in a joint anti-terror drill died from cardiac arrest in the southern Philippine island of Jolo, officials said Monday.
Officials said the soldier, who was part of the Okinawa-based 3rd Marine Expeditionary Forces, died Thursday.
U.S. military officials did not identify the soldier, but said he suffered a heat stroke and eventually died from cardiac arrest. It was the first reported death of a U.S. soldier participating in this year’s joint military drill.
“It was cardiac arrest,” U.S. Air Force Major John Redfield, spokesman of the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines, told the Mindanao Examiner on Monday.
Officials said the soldier, who was part of the Okinawa-based 3rd Marine Expeditionary Forces, died Thursday.
U.S. military officials did not identify the soldier, but said he suffered a heat stroke and eventually died from cardiac arrest. It was the first reported death of a U.S. soldier participating in this year’s joint military drill.
“It was cardiac arrest,” U.S. Air Force Major John Redfield, spokesman of the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines, told the Mindanao Examiner on Monday.
In February 2002, a U.S. MH-47 Chinook helicopter with eight American crew and two soldiers on board crashed during a night flight in the Bohol Strait in central Philippines. There were no survivors.
The American troops were taking part in an anti-terror exercise with Filipino soldiers. The helicopter was on a routine transit from the southern island of Basilan to the island of Mactan where the U.S. maintains a logistics air base.
Eight months later, a U.S. soldier was also killed after an Abu Sayyaf bomb exploded on a roadside restaurant outside a Philippine Army base in Malagutay village in Zamboanga City.
Thousands of U.S. and Filipino troops began a three-week joint military drills, dubbed as Balikatan 2007, aimed at enhancing combat capabilities of soldiers. And this would be followed with similar anti-terror trainings in Tawi-Tawi island near the Sabah border and continued in central Mindanao island.
Filipino troops are battling Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiya militants on Jolo island, about 950 km south of Manila.
The Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiya groups are blamed for the string of bombings in the Philippines and Indonesia that had already killed scores of people the past years.
U.S. and Philippine troops would also embark on humanitarian missions, that included infrastructure projects and medical outreach in poor Muslim areas in during the exercises. (Mindanao Examiner)
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