The helicopter accident occurred on Wednesday in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
The Chief of Staff of the Indian Army, General Bipin Rawat, and his wife are among the 13 killed in the helicopter crash on Wednesday in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
“With deep regret, it is now confirmed that General Bipin Rawat, Mrs. Madhulika Rawat and 11 other people on board (the helicopter) were killed in the unfortunate accident,” the Indian Air Force reported on Twitter.
Shortly before, the institution had announced that an army Mi-17V5 helicopter with the general on board had crashed near Coonoor, in Tamil Nadu.
The 63-year-old soldier, along with his wife and other people, was going aboard the aircraft to the school of the Defense Staff, a high-ranking official told AFP.
The Air Force reported that “an investigation was being carried out to determine the cause of the accident.”
Tamil Nadu State Forest Minister K. Ramachandran told the Times of India newspaper a little earlier from the crash site that seven bodies had been recovered.
“Several wounded were taken to the hospital,” he told the AFP a person in charge of the Coonorr fire department.
The device crashed in a wooded area about 10 kilometers from the nearest road, so the rescuers had to walk to the scene of the accident, he told the AFP another person in charge of the fire brigade.
In the images released by the press, a group of people are seen trying to put out the fire with buckets of water, and a group of soldiers evacuating one of the passengers on a makeshift stretcher.
Local media reported that the helicopter had taken off from the Sulur military air base in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.
They look to Modi
Bipin Rawat, considered close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is India’s first chief of staff, as the post was created by the government in 2019.
Rawat comes from a family with a multi-generational military tradition serving the Indian Army.
He joined the army in 1978 and commanded forces in the Indian part of Kashmir and along the “Royal Line of Control” on the border with China.
He fought separatist insurgents in northeast India and oversaw a cross-border counterinsurgency operation in neighboring Burma.
Between 2017 and 2019 he was the head of the Army. And he was promoted, according to analysts, to improve coordination between the three Army corps (Air, Land and Sea).
The Russian helicopter model Mi-17, involved in the accident, entered service in the 1970s, and is used by armies around the world, although it has been the protagonist of several accidents in recent years.
The last one, last month, killed 14 people after a device of this model of the Azerbaijani army crashed. (I)
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