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Helicopter crashes with India’s defence chief on board: Air force

Helicopter crashes with India’s defence chief on board: Air force

Helicopter crashes with India’s defence chief on board: Air force
Dec 08, 2021 1 min, 26 secs

Military helicopter crashes in Tamil Nadu state, killing at least 13 people including defence chief General Bipin Rawat.

India’s defence chief General Bipin Rawat, his wife, and 11 other people have been killed after a military helicopter they were travelling in crashed in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, the Indian Air Force (IAF) has said.

The Russian-made Mi-17V5 helicopter was on its way from an air force base to the Defence Services Staff College when it crashed.

The air force said one officer, Group Captain Varun Singh, survived and is being treated in a military hospital.

Reporting from New Delhi, Al Jazeera’s Elizabeth Puranam said the trip to the Defence Services Staff College “was not supposed to be a very long ride but this is a very mountainous region, with a lot of forests”.

Archrival Pakistan’s army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, expressed his condolences on the “tragic death” of Rawat and his wife, its government said in a tweet.

Rawat, 63, was India’s first chief of defence staff, a position the Indian government established in 2019 and which he assumed last year after retiring as army chief.

Defence analyst Harsha Kakar, who has also served as a major general in the Indian army, told Al Jazeera that Rawat’s death was “a setback … in terms of the modernisation of the forces”.

The defence chief hailed from a military family, with several generations serving in the Indian armed forces.

The type of military transport helicopter that crashed on Wednesday, Mi-17V5, is widely used in India by the army and ministers when visiting defence locations

Chief of Defence Staff Bipin Rawat says situation tense at the de facto border between the two nations in the Himalayas

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