Three ladies inside a village house were killed and three others in the vicinity injured when an IAF MiG-21 fighter jet during a training mission caught fire in midair and crashed into a Hanumangarh village house in Rajasthan. The pilot parachuted to safety 25 km northeast of the Suratgarh airbase in Sri Ganganagar, from where the Russian-made jet had taken off, the IAF said.
Residents of the village of Bahlol Nagar, 403 km from Jaipur, reported hearing a big blast in the sky in the morning and then seeing the aircraft in flames and spiralling rapidly downward. The MiG-21, part of a fleet that the IAF is in the process of phasing out, apparently disintegrated as it fell. The bulk of the wreckage landed on the house of a man identified as Ratti Ram, IGP (Bikaner range) Om Prakash said.
Ratti Ram’s wife, Bansho Kaur (45), and two other women - Banto Kaur (60) and Leela Devi (55) - were found dead with severe burns inside the damaged house. The three injured were in a nearby compound where portions of the burning jet fell. Saroj (18), Vimla (19) and Virpal Kaur (32) were hospitalised in Hanumangarh.
Announcing a court of inquiry into the crash, the IAF said, “The accident has unfortunately led to the loss of three lives on ground. The IAF regrets this loss and offers its deepest condolences to the bereaved families.”
The last such aircrash in India that led to casualties on the ground was on May 26, 2011, when three residents of a colony in Haryana’s Faridabad died along with all seven people on board a nine-seater chartered aircraft that crashed into the locality.