Sonu Jaiswal apparently made a Facebook Live just before the plane crashed.
New Delhi:
A cellphone recovered from the wreckage of the Yeti Airlines plane that crashed in Nepal today appears to have captured the final, very unsettling, moments of the flight. The twin-engine ATR 72 plane from Kathmandu – which was carrying 72 people – crashed just before landing in Pokhara, a key tourist destination in the Himalayan nation. At least 68 of the passengers are dead.
The video, which is doing the rounds on social media, begins with footage of passengers seated on the plane and the city below seen from the window as the plane circles before landing. Suddenly there is an explosion and the screen goes haywire. The last few seconds reveal a horrific fire outside the window and the screams of distraught passengers can be heard.
NDTV could not independently verify the authenticity of the video.
Another video from the ground had captured the flight’s progress as it began to land. The plane suddenly banked to the left, flipped upside down, and then reportedly burst into a fireball.
There were five Indian passengers on board, all from Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh. One of them, Sonu Jaiswal, apparently did a Facebook Live just before the plane crashed. He is among the dead. The same video can be found on his Facebook account, which is unverified.
Abhishek Pratap Shah, a former MP from Nepal and member of the Central Committee of the Nepalese Congress who sent the video footage, told NDTV that he received the footage from a friend and that it was recovered from the rubble today.
“It was sent by a friend of mine who received it from a police officer. It’s a real record.
Rescue work is expected to resume tomorrow and a search will be carried out for the plane’s black box, which is said to shed light on the causes of the crash. Pokhara is only a 25-minute flight from Kathmandu, the capital of the Himalayan nation.
The aviation sector in Nepal has seen several plane crashes recently and there have been concerns about the safety and training of flight crew.
Since 2013, the European Union has placed Nepal on its aviation safety blacklist. All flights from Nepal have been banned from EU airspace after the International Civil Aviation Organization reported safety concerns.
“This aircraft is the best we have in Nepal and all the leading airlines operate the same aircraft,” Mr Shah said.
Noting that Pokhara is a tourist hub, he said the country needs to “upgrade our aviation system, our planes, our information system, and also our pilots.”
“It is a serious time for Nepal. I think the current government is serious about it,” he added.