Chopper Crash: Footage from the scene showed a crowd of people trying to extinguish the fiery wreck
A helicopter carrying Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat crashed this morning, killing him and 12 others. There were 14 people on board, including his wife.
There were 12 others in a Russian-made Mi-17 chopper that "met with an accident today near Coonoor, Tamil Nadu", Air Force said. At 4.14 pm, Tamil Nadu government officials said that five of the passengers were found dead, two were hospitalized with severe burns, and the remaining had yet to be found.
General Rawat was India's first Chief of Defence Staff, a position that the government established in 2019. He was headed to the Defence Services Staff College in Wellington from the nearby air force base in Coimbatore and the helicopter was already making its descent when it crashed. It came down around 10 kilometres (six miles) from the nearest road, forcing emergency workers to trek to the accident site, officials told news agencies.
Footage from the scene showed a crowd of people trying to extinguish the fiery wreck with water buckets while a group of soldiers carried one of the passengers away on an improvised stretcher.
General Rawat joined the army as a second lieutenant in 1978 and has four decades of service behind him, having commanded forces in Kashmir and along the Line of Actual Control bordering China.
He is credited with reducing insurgency in the Northeast and supervised a cross-border counter-insurgency operation in neighbouring Myanmar.
The air force said an inquiry will determine accountability for today's crash.