A Pakistani army MI-17 helicopter went down Wednesday near Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, killing everyone on board in a crash the military attributed to a technical malfunction — even as the region simmered under a security lockdown triggered by days of deadly unrest.
The army did not disclose the number of personnel aboard. Local residents told reporters the aircraft was carrying paramilitary Rangers who had been deployed to the area as part of a security reinforcement following an attack by an outlawed militant group over the weekend that left four police officers and security personnel dead. Eyewitnesses said the helicopter went down shortly after lifting off from a local helipad, with thick smoke rising from the crash site before emergency teams arrived and began transporting casualties to a nearby medical facility.
The military moved quickly to foreclose any link between the crash and the volatile conditions on the ground.
Muzaffarabad has been gripped by a strike and protest campaign organized by the Joint Awami Action Committee, a recently proscribed alliance whose banning followed the weekend violence. But army spokesmen were explicit: the civil unrest played no role in bringing down the aircraft. A formal board of inquiry has been established to determine the precise cause.
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Whether that distinction holds up under scrutiny will depend, in part, on what the inquiry finds. The region has seen compounding security pressures in recent weeks, and the deployment of Rangers to manage those pressures placed military personnel at the center of the storm the helicopter was flying into — in every sense but, the army says, the literal one.
President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif each issued statements mourning the dead and extending condolences to the victims’ families. Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir also offered his condolences.
Pakistan’s military aviation record carries its own weight here. In September, an army helicopter on a routine northern flight went down, killing two pilots and three technicians. The country’s mountainous north and the Kashmir region present persistent challenges for rotary-wing aircraft — altitude, weather, and terrain forming a combination that has downed military and civilian helicopters alike over the years.
Wednesday’s crash adds to that toll, under circumstances the army is still working to fully explain, in a corner of Pakistan where the official version of events and what residents observed have not always arrived at the same place.