An Arunachal Pradesh police team on Wednesday spotted the debris of an IAF chopper, which went missing on Tuesday, in a deep ravine. They also found the bodies of two crew members.
“The team could not retrieve the bodies as the crash site is located in a deep gorge at the confluence of a waterfall and the Nyorch river. The third body is yet to be traced,” IGP (Law & Order) Nabin Payeng told PTI, adding, extra ground force would move to the site tomorrow to bring the bodies.
The salvaging operations would be taken up again early on Thursday, he said.
The team had spotted the debris of the chopper earlier in on Wednesday and two search teams were deployed at the reported locations.
Wreckage of the missing Indian Air Force helicopter was located in Pampunpare district of Arunachal Pradesh. The helicopter with three operating crews on board had gone missing in the state.
A massive search operation was launched since morning by the Army, Indo Tibetan Border Police along with Arunachal Pradesh Police and India Reserve Battalion to locate the chopper.
Tezpur-based Defence spokesperson Lt Col Sombit Ghosh had said that the chopper had gone out for flood rescue operations from its base in Jorhat on Tuesday morning.
Sagalee Additional Deputy Commissioner J Pertin said the IAF helicopter had made five sorties since it arrived there at around 10:30 am on Tuesday.
“In the sixth sortie to Naharlagun the crew for unknown reason did not take the last batch of nine civilians and took off from Sagalee,” he added.
The helicopter was on a sortie to rescue stranded people at Sagalee following major landslides in Papum Pare district in Arunachal Pradesh.
Earlier, a Border Security Force (BSF) helicopter carrying Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju made an emergency landing in a polytechnic institute playground in Itanagar, the capital of Arunachal Pradesh, not far from where the IAF helicopter went missing.
The Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) of the IAF went missing around 3:47 pm. It took off from Sagalee for Naharlagun heliport, a defence official told media.
The helicopter lost communication with the ground – the Air Traffic Control (ATC) in Chabua in Assam – minutes after it took off from Sagalee after finishing a rescue operation, he added.
In May, two pilots of the Indian Air Force died after a Sukhoi-30 fighter jet crashed near the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border.
In 2015, a Pawan Hans helicopter with three persons on board including Tirap Deputy Commissioner Kamlesh Joshi, crashed in a dense jungle. Joshi was killed in the crash.
In 2011, then Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu and four others died after their Pawan Hans chopper crashed at a remote location in the state. A few days later, another helicopter crashed while landing in Tawang, killing 16 people.
Following the crashes, commercial chopper services were stopped in the state till 2013 when Pawan Hans restarted the service in Arunachal Pradesh and other parts of the region.
Pawan Hans Helicopter Services Limited (PHHL) has been operating chopper services across Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura and daily Guwahati-Tawang services for over 15 years.
It is one of the major lifelines in landlocked and mountainous Arunachal Pradesh.
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