Three survivors were found after the crash of a French military helicopter off Gabon, with one soldier dead and six still missing.
“The provisional toll is one dead, one seriously injured, one lightly injured, one who survived unhurt and six missing,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Francois-Marie Gougeon of the general staff in Paris.
Ten French soldiers, including four crew members and six special forces members, were earlier reported missing after the helicopter crashed into the sea on Saturday during a joint exercise off the coast of Gabon.
The Cougar transport helicopter went down off Nyonie, a small town situated between the capital, Libreville, and the town of Port-Gentil further south, Lieutenant-Colonel Pascal Carpentier said in Libreville.
It crashed at 8:08pm shortly after taking off from the landing craft transporter La Foudre, cruising 50km off the Gabonese coast, Gougeon said.
The ship “set off the alert and went to the scene of the crash with its own rescuers who picked up the injured within half an hour.
CALM CONDITIONS
“The sea was calm and the wind low at the time of the crash but the night was very dark,” he said, adding that “search operations will naturally continue all night” with La Foudre, two helicopters and vessels made available by French oil company Total.
An inquiry would be held into the causes of the accident “very soon,” Gougeon said.
The French presidential palace said in a statement earlier that President Nicolas Sarkozy had been informed about the crash and had “asked that all available means in the area be immediately deployed to find the soldiers who were aboard.”
Sarkozy ordered French Defense Minister Herve Morin to travel to the area. He was expected to leave early yesterday morning.
APPEAL FOR HELP
In Libreville, Carpentier said: “We have put all our available means into the operation. There are aircraft and La Foudre. We have also appealed to Total, which has put three vessels at our disposal.”
Six hundred soldiers backed by Cougar and Fennec helicopters were taking part in a joint exercise to coordinate maritime safety operations. During Operation N’Gari, men were to be parachuted onto predetermined targets including Nyonie.
Carpentier said 120 Gabonese troops participated in the exercise, due to run from Saturday until Wednesday.
“At daybreak we will deploy all our means, planes, helicopters, boats ... to take part in the search.”
Gabonese Interior Minister Andre Mba Obame said France had around 1,000 troops in Gabon, a former French colony, with one of four permanent bases in Africa.
The French Forces in Gabon are here to assure the safety of the 12,000 French residents in the country in case of threat and carry out aid missions, according to a press handout.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers on Monday said that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is less than previously thought, with a 50-50 chance within the next 10 billion years. That is essentially a coin flip, but still better odds than previous estimates and farther out in time. “As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated,” the Finnish-led team wrote in a study appearing in Nature Astronomy. While good news for the Milky Way galaxy, the latest forecast might be moot
RSS