Bodies Recovered From Site Of Indian Military Plane Crash

The Indian Air Force has recovered the remains of 13 personnel aboard its transport aircraft, which crashed on a remote mountainside in north-east India, officials said on Thursday.

The Antonov AN-32 had gone missing on June 3 and its wreckage was spotted during an aerial search mission in the Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh State about a week later.

The air force, which sent a rescue team to the site, had confirmed there were no survivors.

“Our search teams found six bodies and mortal remains of seven others from the crash site this morning,’’ air force spokesman Ratnakar Singh said by phone.

Singh added that search operations have been hampered recently because of bad weather and incessant rains as well as rugged terrain and lack of roads in the remote region.

The aircraft with 13 people on board had lost contact with ground forces after taking off from Jorhat airbase for the Mechuka military landing strip near India’s border with China.

The wreckage was sighted after days of searches using aircraft, satellites and ground teams.

The Soviet-designed AN-32 is a twin-engine turbo-prop military transport aircraft.

It is a workhorse of the IAF, which has about 100 of them in service.

Most of them are four decades old and are undergoing a major upgrade process.

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NAN