KARACHI: A General Court Martial (GCM) in India has ordered the dismissal of an Indian Air Force (IAF) group captain for a friendly missile attack on an Mi-17 helicopter in February 2019, Dawn.com reported on Tuesday.
According to a report, the GCM ordered the dismissal of group captain Suman Roy Chowdhury, who was the chief operations officer of the IAF at the Srinagar Air Force station at the time of the friendly missile attack.
The report said that Chowdhury was held guilty on five of the nine charges, including not obeying the order issued by the air headquarters. He was also held guilty of assigning an inbound flying object to the missile unit on Feb 27, 2019. “As a consequence, the assigned flying target, which actually was friendly copter Mi-17, was shot down,” the report said.
On Feb 27, 2019, an Indian Mi-17 helicopter crashed, killing seven people, including IAF personnel, during a “routine mission”.
Pilot found guilty on five of the nine charges, report says
The incident took place around the same time and on the same day when Pakistan Air Force (PAF) undertook strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) from Pakistani airspace as part of Operation Swift Retort after India violated the boundary and struck Balakot.
The report cleared Wing Commander Shyam Naithani but gave “a severe reprimand for one charge”.
The epicentre of the Pakistan-India escalation was an attack in occupied Kashmir’s Pulwama on Feb 14, 2019, in which more than 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers were killed.
The attack, surpassing one in 2016 when 19 soldiers died, saw explosives packed inside a van rip through buses in a convoy of 78 vehicles carrying some 2,500 members of the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force.
Two blue buses carrying around 35 people each bore the brunt of the explosion around 20 kilometres from the main city of Srinagar on the main highway towards Jammu.
The next day, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his country would give a “strong response” to the Pulwama attack.
The “blood of the people is boiling” and forces behind the act of terrorism will be definitely be punished, he was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times.
Modi didn’t name Pakistan but went on to say: “If our neighbour, which is totally isolated in the world and thinks it can destabilise India through its tactics and conspiracies, then it is making a huge mistake”.
The situation heated up when Indian military planes violated the Line of Control, intruding from the Muzaffarabad sector. “Pakistan Air Force immediately scrambled” and Indian aircraft went back.
Published in Dawn, April 12th, 2023
