Minutes before the plane went down, the four passengers on the tragic Yeti Airlines ATR-72 flight that crashed in Pokhara, Nepal, on Sunday were sharing their experiences on Facebook live. The four passengers were all from the Uttar Pradesh city of Ghazipur. One of them can be seen enthusiastically yelling “Mauj Kar Di” (it’s been fun) as the camera focuses on Pokhara town below in the 1.3-minute live video on Facebook. It should be mentioned that the aeroplane carried 72 passengers, 11 of them were foreigners, including five Indians.
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One of them, Sonu Jaiswal (29), is also featured on the phone camera. However, around 58 seconds in, the footage shows the plane making a fast left turn before crashing and bursting into flames. For the following thirty seconds, the phone camera rolled, catching glimpses of the soaring flames all around it.
These four passengers from Baresar in Ghazipur were among of five Indians who died along with 68 other passengers in the crash.
Plane crash video recorded by victim inside ATR-72 aircraft
Sonu Jaiswal, 29, Anil Rajbhar,28, Vishal Sharma, 23, and Abhishek Singh Kushwaha,23, had landed in Kathmandu on January 13 after performing puja at the Pashupatinath temple; they were heading for Pokhara for paragliding.
On Sunday, a pall of gloom descended on villages in the Baresar and Nonahara areas of the Ghazipur district the four belonged to. Sonu Jaiswal was a liquor trader, while Anil Rajbhar and Abhishek Kushwaha ran Jan Sewa centers at Zahoorabad and Alawalpur in Ghazipur.
Vishal Sharma was a finance officer at a two-wheeler agency. It was Sonu`s FB profile where the video was live, confirmed by his cousin Rajat Jaiswal.
“Sonu was on Facebook live after boarding the flight for Pokhara. The live-streaming showed that Sonu and his companions were in a happy mood, but suddenly, flames appeared before the streaming stopped,” he said.
The Ghazipur district magistrate’s office informed them about the death of four men from the district in a Nepal plane crash. SHO, Baresar, Devendra Pratap Singh said that they confirmed the identity of the four, and then he visited the house of Anil Rajbhar and met his father, Ramdharas.
“Ramdharas told us that the four — Anil, Abhishek, Vishal, and Sonu — had left for Nepal on January 13 and planned to stay for a week,” Singh said. Circle officer, Kasimabad Balram Singh, said that he, along with the SDM, visited the home of the four youths and assured their families of all cooperation in bringing back their bodies.
Abhishek`s elder brother Abhinay said, “In the past three hours, we have received calls from the Nepalese and Indian embassies. We have been informed that bodies will reach Delhi on Monday morning.”
With IANS inputs
