KABUL, 17 August 2005 — A helicopter belonging to a NATO-led international security force crashed yesterday in Afghanistan, killing 17 Spanish troops, while a second chopper made an emergency landing, injuring five more, officials said. The cause of the crash in the desert near the western city of Herat was not immediately known. Spain’s defense minister said he did not rule out hostile fire while an Afghan commander said the two helicopters had collided midair.

A spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, Maj. Andrew Elmes, said it was too early to know the cause, but it was believed to have been an accident and not due to rebel activity. He said earlier that mechanical failure may have been to blame.

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said preliminary information showed no indication that the aircraft was brought down by hostile fire, or of a midair collision with another aircraft. He emphasized that the investigation is still under way.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in a statement that the crash was caused by a sandstorm. But Afghan army commander Abdul Wahab Walizada, whose troops are providing security in the area near Herat, said the weather was fine at the time and that the aircraft came too close to each other while flying and their rotor blades collided.

In Madrid, Spanish Defense Minister Jose Bono said 12 soldiers and five crew died in the accident. He said five soldiers were slightly injured on the helicopter that made the emergency landing. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero broke off his vacation in the Canary Islands to return to Madrid and meet with Defense Ministry officials, his office said.

Elmes said rescuers were on the site, recovering the dead and injured. “We do not think the helicopter crashed because of enemy activity. We think it was an accident,” he said. “The second helicopter landed heavily. There are survivors from that helicopter.” He said both choppers were on a training mission to support legislative elections next month.

Taleban-led rebels have vowed to sabotage the polls and in recent months have stepped up attacks, mostly in the east and south and rarely in Herat and other areas in the west. Bono said the two Spanish helicopters had been flying together before the accident.

One of the pilots reported seeing a column of black smoke in a nearby valley, flew closer to the spot, concluded it might signal an attack from the ground and decided to make an emergency landing. The other helicopter crashed, he said. He said Spanish officials initially thought the crash was an accident, but changed their minds after seeing photographs of the area — a level plain — which would have been an easy place to make an emergency landing.

This circumstance, he said, “leads the military high command not to rule out the hypothesis that it could be an attack rather than an accident.”

“But I am only talking about hypotheses at the military high command,” Bono cautioned. He said he would travel to Afghanistan to help oversee the investigation and repatriation of the bodies. Walizada, the Afghan commander, said the wreckage of one chopper was totally burned, while the other appeared severely damaged, but had not caught fire.

Spain has about 800 troops in Afghanistan assisting the NATO-led security force. The crash was the second major deadly incident involving Spanish troops deployed to Afghanistan.

In May 2003, 62 Spanish peacekeepers returning home from Afghanistan died when their Russian-built YAK-42 plane crashed near Trabzon in northwest Turkey. Thirteen Ukrainian and Belarusian crew members of the aircraft also died.

However, the victims of yesterday’s crash were the first Spanish troops to be killed inside Afghanistan, according to the Spanish Defense Ministry. Yesterday’s incident came less than two months after suspected insurgents shot down a US military Chinook helicopter in eastern Kunar province near the border with Pakistan. All 16 US forces on board were killed. In April, 15 US service members and three American civilians were killed when their Chinook went down in a sandstorm while returning to the main US base at Bagram.