Mystery of missing chopper unsolved in two months

Raipur, Oct 3 (IANS) It's been exactly two months since a Chhattisgarh-bound private helicopter with four crew members on board took off from Hyderabad but never reached its destination. There is still no trace of it or any information on what may have happened.

The families of the missing members have returned home after camping here and in in the Maoist-dominated southern parts of the state for over a month and the police have suspended search operations.

The police say that the Bell-430 Ran Air chopper went off the radar Aug 3 when it was flying over a thickly forested hilly terrain of Chhattisgarh close to the Andhra Pradesh border, where the banned terror outfit, Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) runs a de facto administration since the early 1980s.

The helicopter had four people on board - pilot V.P. Singh, co-pilot R.S. Gaur, engineer Santosh and technician Ashwani.

The relatives of the crew members who stayed for about a month in the Maoist-dominated Dantewada region to get direct feedback from the police on the search operations left the state late September.

The relatives of the missing men even trekked through the forests of Dantewada district and left the state only when the police suspended the search operation and Maoists in reply to relatives' appeal said that they had not hijacked the chopper.

'The police did the best they could. About 12,000 policemen combed all sites where information came in about possible chopper crash including the difficult Bailadila hills. No clue has been found till date,' Girdhari Nayak, state's additional director general of police, told IANS.

Nayak added: 'Search operation has been temporarily discontinued as all our efforts were fruitless; police will look into the issue only when some substantial evidence emerges about the crash site.'

The helicopter that was booked by the Chhattisgarh government for use of party president Rajnath Singh and state Home Minister Ramvichar Netam was scheduled to land at Jagdalpur, the district headquarters of Bastar, for refuelling en route to Raipur.

The police authorities in Dantewada, the base for search operation, had announced a cash reward of Rs.200,000 for any information about the helicopter.