Airliner crashes, 48 killed

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33241, 2 June 1973, Page 15

Airliner crashes, 48 killed

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

NEW DELHI, June 1.

A Minister in the Cabinet of the Indian Prime Minister (Mrs Gandhi) and India’s new High Commissioner in Australia were killed with 46 other people when a blazing airliner crashed last night near a Delhi residential area in which many foreign diplomats live.

The jet, a Boeing 737 ofiii Indian Airlines, came down c in flames while preparing to land after a two-hour flight £ from the south Indian city of Madras. 1 Seventeen survivors, in- ® eluding a Deputy Minister, g Mr Bal Govind Verma, two s other Parliamentarians, and s the pilot and co-pilot, were J rushed to hospital by people from the colony and rescue a teams. r The dead included Mr Mo- f han Kumaramangalam, Mrs ) Gandhi’s Minister of Steel I and Mines, and Mr Gurnam Singh, a former Chief Minis- 1 ter of Punjab State who was I only recently appointed High c Commissioner to Australia, r The blazing aircraft appar- 1 ently broke up before crash- c

ing. Two hours after the crash, parts of the fuselage were still burning. One portion of the aircraft lay several hundred yards away. Eye-witnesses say that they saw at least two separate balls of flame coming out of the airliner. Some passengers who managed to scramble from the wreckage said that they could see the flames from inside, and that there had been panic aboard. It was the second serious air crash on the approach route to Delhi’s Palam Airport, and the third near the Vasant Vihar colony in the last year. Eighty-nine people were killed when a Japan Airlines DC-10 crashed on. Delhi’s outskirts last June, and two months later an Indian Airlines Fokker Friendship crashed, killing 18 persons.