General Rawat was alive, asked for water, says villager

The villager, who was among the first respondents, said they shifted people out of the wreckage, put them on blankets and took them to a hospital

A villager who was among the group of people to first reach the site of the IAF chopper crash at Kattari Park in Tamil Nadu's Coonoor, on Thursday said that Chief of Defence Staff, General Bipin Rawat, was alive when they found him and was asking for water.

Talking to mediapersons at Coonoor, the villager, Sivakumar, said, "We reached the spot immediately after the crash and found three people alive and of them, one was asking for water. We didn't have water but we immediately put the three of them on separate blankets and took them to the Wellington Army hospital."

He, however, said that he did not know that it was General Rawat and could only identify him when he saw his photographs later.

Sivakumar said that besides himself, two others, identified as Krishna Moorthy and M Ravikumar, were the first people to reach the spot on hearing the crash.

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