GUWAHATI: The charred remains of seven military personnel, killed in a chopper crash in Arunachal Pradesh last week, were retrieved from treacherous terrains through a risky air operation. Had the armed forces wanted to ensure a proper wrapping of the bodies or carry coffins, it would have taken them at least seven hours drive and foot march to reach the crash site. But under pressure to conduct the retrieval at the earliest, they chose a compromise and decided to airlift them in what was acknowledged as another risky helicopter sortie.
The crash took place in Tawang district when the personnel, five from the Indian Air Force and two from the Indian Army, were on an “air maintenance mission”.Three days since the tragedy, there is now outrage on the social media after images, showing the mortal remains wrapped in cardboard boxes, went viral. Lt Gen (retd) HS Panag had shared the images on Twitter.
Here is why the mortal remains were retrieved in that manner.
Government sources told The New Indian Express that the bodies were retrieved and transported by air, first to the Khirmu helipad near Tawang and then to Tezpur and Guwahati in Assam.
“There is no road to the crash site. If you want to reach the place by road and foot, it will take you at least seven hours. In that case, the bodies could have been retrieved only the next day. So, in order to expedite the whole process, a chopper was pressed into service,” the sources said. They also said that coffins were not readily available in Tawang or elsewhere in the district.“
There are no shops in Tawang that deal in coffins. If someone needs a coffin, he or she shall have to place an order at a carpenter’s shop and it will be delivered the next day or two days later,” the sources said.
A senior defence official, who spoke on the strict condition of anonymity, said the operation itself spoke of the region’s difficult terrain.“It was an air maintenance mission. Such missions are conducted only in remote and inaccessible locations where the troops are deployed. And this was not the first time that bodies were retrieved that way in Arunachal,” he pointed out.
Arunachal has a dubious history of recording a large number of air crashes since World War II.
During the war, a number of US planes had gone missing in the sky of the Himalayan state.
Till date, there is no trace of the wreckage of most of them. The flight path over the frontier state was nicknamed “the Hump” by the Allied Forces.