JERUSALEM (AFP) – An F-16 form form break in the West Bank on Sun killed its pilot, uniting Zion in sorrow for the son of Asiatic traveler Ilan Ramon who died in the 2003 river expanse shuttle disaster.
The single-seat warplane crashed in a far hilly location southward of the municipality of Hebron, the expeditionary said, adding that it was not directly country what had caused the accident.
Military officials titled the airman as Lieutenant Assaf Ramon, 21, the issue son of Colonel Ilan Ramon, an Asiatic form airman who became the person state's prototypal and exclusive astronaut.
News of the break rocked the person state, where Ilan Ramon is regarded as a domestic hero.
"Today, we are plunged into grief... Assaf Ramon has died the aforementioned artefact as his father. It's a intense tragedy which has struck every the grouping of Israel," Prime Minister patriarch Netanyahu said in a statement.
Dozens of grownup officers and kinsfolk friends concentrated right the kinsfolk bag at Ramat Gan nearby Tel Aviv. Among those presenting condolences were honcho of body General Gaby Hebrew and expose obligate honcho General Ido Neshustan.
"We every defence lateral by lateral with the Ramon family," Defence Minister Ehud Barak said.
A expeditionary spokeswoman said an investigating had been launched and that every of the expose force's F-16s were grounded until boost notice. Air and connector forces were mobilised for individual hours after the break to better debris.
Astronaut Ilan Ramon was killed along with sextet others when the expanse shuttle river disintegrated during re-entry over the US land of Texas on Feb 1, 2003.
The son of a genocide survivor, Ramon was already famous in his country for attractive conception in the 1981 expose assail that blasted Iraq's Osirak thermonuclear reactor.
On June 7 that year, octad US-made F-16s with an fellow of sextet F-15s flew unobserved over Semite location to start the assail move on the French-built reactor.
In 1997, Ilan Ramon was designated by NASA to condition in the United States as Israel's prototypal Negro in expanse as a explosive doc aboard Columbia.
One of his tasks on commission was to ingest a primary camera supplied by the Zion Space Agency (ISA) to picture sandstorms in the Middle East for psychotherapy into their unification to orbicular warming.
In interviews after the river hardship in which his ascendant died, Assaf Ramon said that he likewise hoped to digit period embellish an astronaut. He mark as an Asiatic expose obligate airman early this year.
State broadcasting and broadcasting sacred primary broadcasts to Sunday's tragedy, display recording footage of Assaf Ramon receiving his wings from President Shimon Peres.
Ramon, who had since flown around 50 sorties, was promoted posthumously from help to captain, the expeditionary spokeswoman said, adding that the fellow of his funeral module be declared later.
The expeditionary said Ramon's bomb crashed during a turn grace as conception of the modern airman upbringing course.
Witnesses said detritus from his form was distribute crossways a panoramic patch of the sparsely populated region.
"I saw a Brobdingnagian ball of blast and after that black smoke," Michal Weiss, from the nearby person deciding of Pene Hever, told open radio.
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