A HAMPSHIRE soldier was killed unlawfully while on active service, a coroner has ruled.

Private Eleanor Dlugosz was killed in a roadside bomb attack while serving in Iraq, the inquest at Trowbridge, Wiltshire heard..

Coroner David Masters heard how the army medic was "dead virtually instantaneously".

Private Eleanor Dlugosz was one of four soldiers who were killed when a bomb exploded underneath their warrior armoured vehicle.

Pathoghlogist Doctor Nicholas Hunt said there was nothing that anyone could have done to save the 19-year-old who died in the attack during the early hours of April 5 last year.

The inquest was told that it was the first explosion of such velocity in Iraq causing the armoured vehicle she was travelling in to twist over at an angle leaving it facing upwards, with its side protective armour blown off.

Alan Happer from the Ministry of Defence said that no body armour could have protected the dead soldiers but said that a major programme was underway to enhance armoured vehicles, including reinforcing the undercarriage.

Eleanor was one of four soldiers to die in the blast. A second woman, Second Lieutenant Joanna Yorke Dyer from the Intelligence Corps attached to the 2nd Battalion The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment, and two male soldiers from the Royal Army Medical Corps and 2nd Battalion The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment also died, along with a Kuwaiti interpreter.

Pte Dlugosz, known as DZ to her friends, was with the Royal Army Medical Corps and had first been deployed to Iraq in November 2006, but she had returned to the UK to complete a medical course and then travelled back to the war-torn country just weeks before her death.