Four killed in plane crash during UAE-Egypt military exercise

A military aircraft crashed in Egypt on Wednesday killing two Egyptian and two Emirati crew members, officials said.

The General Headquarters of the UAE Armed Forces said the military aircraft crashed during “a routine joint training exercise between the UAE and Egyptian armed forces", according to official news agency WAM.

“The concerned authorities are investigating the incident,” the WAM statement read, without going into further details.

The crash took place at 17:00 GMT on Wednesday and was caused by a "technical problem", Egypt's army spokesman Mohamed Samir said in a Facebook statement. He did not specify the type of aircraft involved. 

The two countries started a joint military drill on 11 December, the latest in a series of trainings between them.

The UAE is a close ally of Egypt and has provided Cairo with billions of dollars in aid. Abu Dhabi applauded July 2013’s popularly backed military coup that ousted former president Mohamed Morsi.

The UAE, along with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have blacklisted Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation.

Military cooperation between Egypt and the UAE was taken to a new level in recent months, after it was revealed in the New York Times that the two countries had carried out air strikes in Libya against militias battling government-allied forces.