Two men, who shot the video showing the final moments of the Mi-17V5 helicopter that crashed 13 Army officers and personnel including Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Gen Bipin Rawat, appeared before Coimbatore Police on Friday and extended cooperation with the probe.
Nasar and Joe, who had been vacationing in the Nilgiris on Wednesday, began recording a video after they heard a helicopter flying in the area. But little did the entourage know that their mobile phones were capturing the crash of a helicopter with CDS on board.
“The weather was misty. We saw the helicopter and suddenly it disappeared into the sky. Moments later, we heard a huge noise. We did not know what happened and we decided to climb up to the road to check the fate of the helicopter. Since my daughter got injured while climbing up, we took time to reach the road,” Nasar said.
After reaching the road connecting Ooty with Mettupalayam, the duo found several vehicles parked on the road and contacted a policeman and narrated the incident. “It was the police personnel who asked us to send the video to his WhatsApp, and we followed the same. We were asked to leave the spot immediately,” Nasar added.
The duo told the Coimbatore Police on Friday that they will join the investigation if need be. They said they have given their contact details and residence address to the police and narrated the incident to them. “We told them that we are ready to appear before the police anytime regarding the incident,” Nasar said.
Joe said they did not expect a “normal video” shot by them to turn into evidence of a chopper crash. “We recorded because we heard the sound of a chopper. Only when we went back home in the night, we realised the magnitude of the crash. We didn’t know that the chopper had India’s top general on board,” he said.
The duo added that they first believed that the chopper had crashed in deep forests but realised that the spot was very close to a human habitation site only when they reached the main road. Eye-witnesses who alerted the Nilgiris district police and fire rescue personnel about the crash had on Wednesday said the chopper flew dangerously close to the residential areas before it fell to the ground.
The advanced helicopter hit a tree in the reserve forest in Nanjappanchathiram village before it caught fire and went in flames. If the crash had taken place a few hundred metres away, there could have been heavy civilian causalities, the sources added.
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