A Tornado GR4 fighter-bomber was shot down by a U.S. Patriot missile

LONDON, March 24 (News Agencies) - The British press reacted with shock Monday, March 24, at the shooting down of a Tornado fighter by an American Patriot missile shortly after two tragic air accidents claimed 14 British lives.

"Friendly Fire -- shock as our people are killed by allies," headlined the Daily Mirror, the strongest voice of opposition to war among British newspapers, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The Times said the "appalling military blunder" was "a tragedy for the families of the two-man crew" and an "unwelcome complication in the close coordination of the British and U.S. forces fighting in Iraq."

Air Marchal Brian Burridge, chief of British forces, insisted Sunday, March 23, that the liaison between the British and the American was "the most intimate alliance you can imagine."

"Here we have two nations who share the risks, share the dangers, share the rewards. You develop a bond of trust because you are taking on the responsibility for each others' lives," he told the BBC.

"This is a sad moment but we'll put it behind us as quickly as we can in a military sense and carry on with our objectives," he said.

Worst Start

But a British military source quoted in The Times described the incidents as "the worst start you could have" and said "there will be a slight undermining of confidence on behalf of the guys (troops)."

Officially there will be no words of reproach from Britain, but behind the scenes there is outrage and demands for an explanation, The Daily Telegraph said.

"I am missing two very good men," said visibly upset RAF commander Simon Dobb, according to the Telegraph.

"They were both experienced Tornado aircrew, courageous and committed to the job they were asked to do. They were not lost in combat but on returning from a mission. This is a huge problem to the detachment and particularly to their squadron," he said.

At U.S. Central Command in Qatar there was a mixture of bewilderment and anger among British officers, the Daily Mirror said.

Royal Air Force and U.S. army special investigators will fly to Kuwait to conduct a joint inquiry, the Financial Times reported.

At the centre of the inquiry will be the performance of the aircraft's 'identification friend or foe' (IFF) system -- an encrypted and coded signal used to communicate with a friendly airbase's defense system -- it said.

The Daily Mail said that last year a scathing parliament accused the British defense ministry of having done little to learn the lessons of the Gulf War and of being slow in providing a fully up-to-date IFF system.

The shooting down was a "tragic echo" of accidents in the 1991 Gulf War, the newspaper said.

During that campaign, friendly fire accounted for 35 of the 148 Americans who lost their lives and 72 of the 467 who were wounded. There was uproar in Britain after a U.S. fighter plane attacked a British armored convoy killing nine soldiers.   

Meanwhile, leading U.S. newspapers were reflective Monday, March 24, about the weekend toll from the war in Iraq, noting the unexpectedly large number of coalition casualties in front-page news articles and opinion page commentaries.

Free Of Causalities

"The first days of the war in Iraq were so smooth, Americans might have been forgiven for imagining that the conflict would be clean and relatively free of casualties," the New York Times noted in a Monday newspaper editorial.

"Then over the weekend, they were faced with battlefield death, human error and other tragedies."

"Now we are beginning to see the other, where welcoming civilians may turn out to be lethal Iraqi soldiers in disguise, where coalition troops inflict casualties not only on the enemy but on each other," the Times wrote. "In a sense, the real war has just begun."

Sunday was "a day of painful loss for American and British service men and women, the costliest in combat for the American military since Somalia in 1993 or maybe even since the Persian Gulf War," the Washington Post lead editorial noted.

While Americans during World War II "learned of setbacks and mistakes long after the fact, if at all, the nation (Sunday) felt the blows almost as they occurred," the Post noted.

At least 10 U.S. soldiers were captured after fighting in southern Iraq, the Pentagon said, and Iraq said that 25 U.S. and British soldiers were killed in fierce tank and gun battles.

On Saturday, a U.S. soldier at a base in Kuwait said to have "disciplinary" problems, killed a colleague and wounded 12 others by lobbing hand grenades into their tents.

And two British airmen were missing after their Tornado bomber was shot down unintentionally by a U.S. Patriot missile near the Kuwaiti border with Iraq.

In the first days of the war, Iraqi soldiers surrendered in droves and many townspeople welcomed the U.S.-led forces as liberators.

Neither newspaper editorial mentioned the 'more than 200 Iraqi civilians' that Baghdad claims were injured in air raids over the capital in the past days, or any of the Iraqi military casualties.