Twelve British soldiers injured in horrific six-car pile up in Estonia with eight ‘seriously injured’ airlifted back to UK
As many as 12 British soldiers have been injured in a six-car crash in Estonia.
The troops, out in the Baltic state on a Nato training exercise, had been travelling in a convoy of minibuses on Friday when the pile-up happened.
It’s understood that the soldiers were being driven through blizzard conditions some 20 miles from the Russian border when their vehicles slammed into an existing pile-up of civilian cars at a crossroads.
Five civilians were also injured.
Local media reports allege that a 37-year-old woman had turned across the road in a Volvo S80 and hit a BMW 530D, driven by a 62-year-old woman.
Meanwhile, the Army convoy was made up of three Toyota people-carriers whose drivers were unable to stop in the wintry conditions.
A Mercedes Sprinter van travelling in the opposite direction was also involved in the crash.
After the pile-up, the RAF scrambled a C-17 Globemaster medical evacuation jet with an on-board intensive care unit to the scene.
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Air Force medics then picked up eight seriously injured personnel from Estonian capital Tallinn and flew them to Birmingham Airport.
Images from the scene show five ambulances and several other vehicles parked at the rear of the RAF jet which had its tail ramp open.
On Sunday, the soldiers were transferred to the West Midlands city’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital – which houses the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine.
The troops had been serving on Operation Cabrit, the British arm of Nato’s “enhanced forward presence” (EFP) on the Russian border.
It’s understood they had been stationed in Tapa – the fifth-largest of Nato’s EFP bases – alongside a number of other service personnel from different member states of the alliance.
The Nato bases along the Russian border have been manned since before Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
But the international presence at the sites – from the Baltic states all the way south to Romania and Bulgaria – has only ramped up since then.
Just days ago, British troops in Finland conducted new tests of “battle-winning weaponry” in what’s been labelled Nato’s largest artillery exercise ever carried out in Europe.