As chopper fails to land,angry Omar cancels meet

Following miscommunication between Barabanki district administration and the local Congress office,a chopper carrying J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Wednesday hovered in the air for long,unable to find a landing spot on the given coordinates.

Following miscommunication between Barabanki district administration and the local Congress office,a chopper carrying J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Wednesday hovered in the air for long,unable to find a landing spot on the given coordinates.

Omar was to address a public meeting in Dariabad area of Faizabad constituency in Barabanki. Angry over the mismanagement,he not only decided to skip the Faizabad meet but also cancelled another public meeting and a media conference in Lucknow later in the evening.

We are going to complain to the Election Commission. The district administration provided us the wrong coordinates on purpose, said Nirmal Khatri,Congress candidate from Faizabad. Our meeting was scheduled in Dariabad,but his chopper made over five or six rounds over Tikait Nagar area of Barabanki,which is about 10 km away.

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Barabanki District Magistrate K Ravindra Naik,however,said the administration had given the right coordinates to the Congress district office on Tuesday.

The Congress office did not follow our coordinates and gave their own. Any helicopter can land on the coordinates we provided, Naik said which was 26 degrees,53 minutes,20 seconds north. But the coordinates Congress provided to the pilot were 26 degrees,56 minutes,54 seconds north.

Omar was coming to Faizabad after addressing three public meetings in other parts of the state.

He was not unhappy with us,but was rather annoyed with the UP government as they did not provide us the right coordinates. He decided to go back immediately because of the mistake of the state government, said Subodh Srivastava,chief spokes-person of the UPCC.

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