(Coonoor) Indian Army Chief of Staff Gen. Bipin Rawat, his wife and 11 others were killed in a helicopter crash on Wednesday in southern Tamil Nadu state. India.
“With our deep regrets, it is now certain that General Bipin Rawat, Madhulika Rawat and 11 other people on board died in this regrettable accident,” tweeted the air force.
Considered close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, General Bipin Rawat, 63, was India’s first chief of staff, a post created in 2019.
“His untimely death constitutes an irreparable loss for our armed forces and our country,” tweeted Defense Minister Rajnath Singh.
The helicopter, a Russian-made Mi-17, crashed for some reason near Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, as it began its descent.
He was heading to the Defense Services Staff College (DSSC), a defense training institution, where the general was to speak to young recruits and personnel from a nearby air base, a senior officer told AFP. of the Army.
Videos broadcast on Indian news channels showed the wreckage of the burning device at the crash site, in a dense forest area near its destination, with people attempting to put out the blaze with buckets water and a group of soldiers taking a wounded man on a makeshift stretcher.
One survivor
The helicopter crashed about 10 kilometers from the nearest road, forcing rescuers to walk to the crash site, a fire official told AFP.
Indian media reported that the aircraft took off from Sulur Air Force base in Coimbatore on Wednesday afternoon.
The sole survivor of the crash, a DSSC captain, was transported to a nearby military hospital, the air force said.
Coming from a military family whose generations served in the Indian armed forces, General Rawat joined the army as a second lieutenant in 1978.
In four decades of service, he had commanded the armed forces in India-administered Kashmir, and those stationed along its line of control from China.
Among his feats of arms, he is credited with having weakened a separatist insurgency on the northeastern border of India.
He was Chief of the Army, 1.3 million strong, from 2017 to 2019, before being elevated to the rank of Chief of Staff, a post created to improve the coordination between the air and land forces and the navy.
“He succeeded perfectly in this mission, and it will not be easy to find a successor for him,” retired General DS Hooda, former commander of the northern region of the Indian army, told AFP.
Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said he was “deeply moved” by his death.
“We have worked closely together in recent years. It is a huge loss for the nation, ”he said.
US Defense Minister Lloyd Austin called Bipin Rawat “a friend and partner of the United States” who “played a large part in building the American-Indian partnership on defense.”
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres “expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, to the people and to the Indian government”, through his spokesman Stephane Dujarric, who recalled that General Rawat had commanded the mission of the Peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2008 and 2009.
The Russian Mi-17 helicopter, which entered service in the 1970s and used by armies around the world, has been involved in a number of accidents over the years.
An aircraft of this type from the Azerbaijani army crashed during a training flight last month. Fourteen people lost their lives in the accident.
In 2019, four Indonesian soldiers were killed and five others wounded in central Java in another training drama that involved an Mi-17.
The Indian Air Force announced the opening of an investigation into Wednesday’s crash.