NEW DELHI, July 18 – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flight was in the same air corridor as the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines MH17 which crashed in Ukraine on Thursday. Modi’s flight to India, which took off from Frankfurt two hours before the crash, was re-routed, The Hindu reported.
The prime minister was returing to India after attending the sixth BRICS Summit held in Brazil from July 14 to 16. The MH17 plane went down at Torez near Shakhtersk some 40 km from the Russia border in Ukraine after going off the radar at 7 p.m. Indian Standard Time (IST).
According to the report, Modi’s flight Air India-001 took off from Frankfurt at 4.30 p.m. IST and the journey to Ukraine’s city of Donetsk would take
approximately three hours. “That would have put him (Modi) over Ukraine’s Flight Information Region (FIR) about an hour after MH17,” the English Daily reported.
“There was no danger to the prime minister’s plane but obviously the area that they would have flown over would have been the same,” the report quoted an unnamed aviation official as saying. All flights over the area were rerouted after the crash. The report said no information of any Indians on board MH17 had been received.
-BERNAMA
