A baby who was evacuated from Afghanistan with her parents died suddenly after landing in the US this week, authorities said. It's the first reported death among Afghan evacuees in the US after they scrambled to flee the country under Taliban rule.
On Wednesday night, police responded to a call about an unresponsive 9-month-old girl on a flight with Afghan evacuees that had just landed in Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia Police Department told BuzzFeed News the infant was unresponsive upon arrival at 9:16 p.m. ET.
The family had flown in from Ramstein Air Base in Germany after being evacuated from Afghanistan, ABC News reported.
According to police, medics immediately transported the 9-month-old to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia after "a medical emergency" during the flight. By 10:10 p.m., however, the child was pronounced dead at the hospital, police said.
The girl's death is currently being investigated by the Philadelphia Police Department's Special Victims Unit, while the medical examiner's office will investigate the cause of her death.
The final US military aircraft departed Afghanistan on Monday, with 123,000 US citizens and Afghan allies evacuated between the end of July and the end of August, the White House said. Evacuation efforts, already difficult after Kabul fell to the Taliban, became scarcer and more life-threatening because of Taliban checkpoints, as well as threats of ISIS-K attacks and a suicide bombing that killed 13 US military personnel and dozens of Afghan civilians.
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