New Delhi: Stunned soldiers perched on a mountain-top post on the Line of Control watched nonplussed as one of their helicopters flew over them and into Pakistani territory on Sunday an hour after noon.
The chopper from the Army Aviation Corp’s 666 Siachen Falcons squadron was returned to Kargil in India five hours later, much to the relief of New Delhi and Islamabad, neither of whom want to precipitate a military crisis at this time.
But the incident has led to long faces in the Indian Army and security establishment and there is a sense of wonderment over how the two sides managed to prevent the incident from snowballing despite the sensitive region in which it occurred.
Pakistan especially would be touchy about aerial intrusions, particularly after the American raid that took out Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in May this year.
In India, the army aviation wing is already talking about the poor navigational aids that they have to operate with in some of the harshest terrains in the world.
The Indian soldiers — Lt Colonel S.P. Verma (engineer officer), Majors R.G. Raja and G. Kapila (pilots), and Subedar Adhilesh Sharma (assistant to the engineer officer) — were debriefed by superiors last night and today. They were trying to determine how the Cheetah helicopter went across.
25/10/11 Sujan Dutta/The Telegraph
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