A US fighter jet crashed during a training mission in the United Arab Emirates, a US official said, but no one was hurt. The F-15E Strike Eagle crashed on Thursday morning, the Air Force said in a statement. Both pilots ejected from the plane safely, and the cause of the crash is being investigated. While the Pentagon said the location of the crash could not formally be released because the host government preferred not to do so, a US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the plane went down in the United Arab Emirates. The crash came several days after the US military said it had deployed several of its most advanced stealth fighters, the F-22, to the Gulf, Reuters reported. The placing of US aircraft in the region has been portrayed by the Pentagon as routine even as tensions rise between Israel and Iran over Tehran's disputed nuclear programme. "This is a scheduled deployment," Major James Bressendorff, a military spokesman, said of the placement of an unspecified number of F-22s in the region. He said F-22s had been deployed there multiple times over the years.
