The Indian army is in mourning.
Chief of Staff Gen. Bipin Rawat, his wife and 11 others were killed in a helicopter crash on Wednesday in Tamil Nadu state, southern India.
"His untimely death constitutes an irreparable loss for our armed forces and our country," tweeted Defense Minister Rajnath Singh.
Believed to be close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the 63-year-old general was the country's first chief of staff, a post created in 2019. The helicopter, a Russian-made Mi-17, s' crashed for some reason near Coonoor as he began his 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 single survivor
Videos broadcast on Indian news channels showed the wreckage of the flaming device in a dense forest area near its destination, people attempting to put out the blaze with buckets of water and a group of soldiers taking a wounded man away on a makeshift stretcher. The helicopter crashed about 10 kilometers from the nearest road, forcing rescuers to walk to the crash site. The sole survivor of the crash, a DSSC captain, was transported to a nearby military hospital.
Coming from a military family which several 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 Kashmir administered by India, and those posted along the line of control between India and China.
Among his feats of arms, he is credited with having weakened a separatist insurgency on the northeastern border of India.
The United States greets a "friend"
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 has succeeded perfectly in this mission, and it will not be easy to find a successor for him," said retired General DS Hooda, former commander of the North region.
The US Minister of Defense Lloyd Austin for his part described Bipin Rawat "a friend and partner of the United States", who "has largely participated in building the American-Indian partnership on defense".
The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for his part "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 the general had ordered the mission of the peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2008 and 2009.
Economy
The armaments giants still record record sales in 2020, despite the Covid-19
World
13 civilians killed by security forces in northeast India
Crash
Accident
India
Army
Helicopter
World
0 comment
0 share
Share on Messenger
Share on Facebook
Share on twitter
Share on Flipboard
Share on Pinterest
Share on Linkedin
Send by Mail
To safeguard
A fault ?
To print