Helicopter crashes with India military chief on board
NEW DELHI: A helicopter carrying defence chief General Bipin Rawat crashed yesterday, the air force said, with a government minister at the scene saying at least seven people were dead.
Rawat is India’s first chief of defence staff, a position that the government established in 2019, and is seen as close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The 63-year-old was travelling with his wife and 12 others in a Russian-made Mi-17 chopper that “met with an accident near Coonoor, Tamil Nadu”, the Indian Air Force said.
It was unclear whether Rawat had survived the accident.
Footage from the scene showed a crowd of people trying to extinguish the fiery wreck with water buckets while soldiers carried one of the passengers away on an improvised stretcher.
At least seven bodies had been recovered, Tamil Nadu forests minister K. Ramachandran said from the scene of the crash, according to the Times of India.
“Some of the injured have been taken to the hospital,” a fire department official in Coonoor said.
Rawat was headed for the Defence Services Staff College from the nearby Sulur air force base in Coimbatore and the helicopter was already making its descent.
It came down around 10km from the nearest road, forcing emergency workers to trek to the accident site, another fire official said.
Rawat comes from a military family with several generations having served in the Indian armed forces.
The general joined the army as a second lieutenant in 1978 and has four decades of service behind him, having commanded forces in Indian-administered Kashmir and along the Line of Actual Control bordering China.