Ten Danish soldiers have failed to return from a training exercise prompting a helicopter search in Finnmark.
Police helicopters and drones, rescue dogs, the Red Cross and the Armed Forces are all now searching for the missing unit amid fears ‘something happened to them’.
Jørgen Haukland Hansen, an operations manager for Finnmark Police District, said the soldiers should have returned to base no later than 7am this morning.
He told Dagbladet that police were notified at 4.37pm, and they immediately sent resources to help the search.
He said: ‘One of the options is the soldiers may have misunderstood the meeting time.
‘The other is that something may have happened to them, and that is why we have now initiated a search.’
The search was initiated at 6.30pm, the operations manager said.
Twelve hours after their supposed meeting time police confirmed half of the soldiers had been found safe.
Three returned to the meeting point, while two were located by helicopter.
Finnmark is an area ‘where East meets West’ bordering Troms county to the west, Finland’s Lapland region to the south, and Russia’s Murmansk Oblast to the east.