MiG crashes into colony, 5 killed

The IAF has ordered a Court of Inquiry. A senior official of the Western Air Command, Air Vice-Marshal Sudhir Shah, visited the site in the evening and met the pilot and survivors.

The incident occured around 10.15 am when the plane was on a routine sortie from the Halwara air base. But it apparently developed a snag, forcing the pilot to eject.

According to eyewitness reports, the casualty figures could have been higher had the aircraft hit a petrol pump situated a little distance from the spot. In fact, they say, the debris fell inside the complex, as the plane hit the rooftops of two houses and then a rented accommodation. Among those killed were a shopkeeper Raju, his wife Pammi, who was five months pregnant, and her 15-year-old nephew Sunny who had come visiting. Raju’s mother, Bimla Devi, was rushed to the Dayanand Medical College and Hospital (DMCH) at Ludhiana in a serious condition where she succumbed to her injuries.

The fifth person to die was Gurpreet Singh, son of house owner Bhola Purshotam. Bhola, wife Kuldip Kaur and daughter Manjinder Kaur, who sustained multiple fractures in the skull and chest, are in a serious condition. Doctors say Manjinder’s recovery chances are slim.

The pilot has been admitted at the Air Force hospital in Halwara. He has minor injuries. Villagers in Sarabha, where the pilot bailed out, saw him land in the fields and brought him to Halwara.

In Mullanpur-Dakha, people launched rescue operations almost immediately, pulling out people from the debris even as the place was engulfed in flames. Besides Raju’s family, there were two other families living as tenants in the house.

Jagdeep, a young lad, who was working in his fields in Jangpur, had seen the aircraft ‘‘flying dangerously low and on fire.’’ He reached the spot in no time and helped pull out members of the two families who had a miraculous escape.

Surinder Kaur was in the kitchen when the aircraft crashed. ‘‘There was no noise at all. I only noticed the window panes shattering and the glass fragments flying all over the place. Then there was a loud noise, which was followed by thick black smoke and there were flames all around. I don’t know what happened thereafter,’’ she recalls. It took 12 fire-tenders from Ludhiana, Halwara and Jagraon almost two hours to bring the flames under control.

Calling it ‘‘unfortunate,’’ Vice-Marshall Shah said that ‘‘incidents like these are rare since every pilot is trained to avoid populated areas.’’ He added that the pilot, Flt Lt Gill, had told him that he had followed the set procedure. ‘‘But in Punjab, there has been such an increase in the built-up area that there are hardly any vacant spaces left,’’ he said.

According to a PTI report, the black box of the aircraft has been recovered and could provide clues to the probable cause of the crash, senior IAF officials said.

Meanwhile, Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh has announced an ex gratia relief of Rs one lakh each to the next of kin of those killed and Rs 50,000 to the injured. The IAF would also provide Rs 40,000 to the kin of the dead and Rs 20,000 to the injured. District administration officials said that the injured would be treated free of cost at the DMCH in Ludhiana.