Armored Vehicle in Kosovo Flips; 2 GIs Killed, 3 Injured

The deaths occurred Sunday when the armored carrier lost a track and overturned while on patrol about 10 miles northeast of Gnjilane, the town in southeastern Kosovo where U.S. forces have their headquarters.

On Monday evening, U.S. military officials in Europe could provide no further details and were withholding the names of the dead and injured pending notification of a family member who could not be reached.

“They just haven’t given us anything on it, except that it rolled over,” said Air Force Maj. Linda Hutchins, a spokeswoman for the U.S. military’s European Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

The remains of the dead soldiers were transported by helicopter from their personnel carrier to a U.S. Army hospital at Camp Bondsteel near Urosevac, about 17 miles southwest of Gnjilane. The remains were then to be flown from Skopje, Macedonia, to the U.S. military air base in Ramstein, Germany, and afterward to destinations chosen by the families.

The three injured soldiers were returned to their unit.

All were assigned to the 9th Engineer Battalion of the 1st Infantry Division based in Schweinfurt, Germany.

U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that the peacekeeping mission poses grave dangers to U.S. troops, including from mines, booby traps and sniper fire. So far, however, there have been no combat casualties, although snipers have fired at U.S. troops.

On June 21, two Gurkha explosives experts serving with British forces in Kosovo--a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic--were killed trying to destroy “bomblets” from NATO cluster bombs that were dropped during the air campaign.

A U.S. soldier died July 4 in a traffic accident in neighboring Macedonia.

There were no U.S. casualties in the 11-week North Atlantic Treaty Organization air war, although thousands of Serbs and ethnic Albanians were killed. In early May, two Army helicopter pilots died when their Apache crashed during training in the Albanian mountains.