A pilot and two provincial ministers, one of them a billionaire industrialist, were killed on Thursday when their helicopter crashed in a village in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, police said.
Two others on board the seven-seat private executive helicopter were injured in the crash in the village of Gangoh, police superintendent S. A. Rizvi said, adding that one of them was in critical condition.
Haryana state power minister Om Prakash Jindal ¡ª head of the $2.2-billion steel manufacturing Jindal group ¡ª his colleague, agriculture minister Surinder Singh, and the pilot died instantly when the French-made aircraft crashed after a mid-air engine failure, officials said.
Survivor Ved Goyal, a relative of Jindal, later told private television networks that the New Delhi-bound aircraft came down moments after its engine failed some 30 minutes after taking off from the Harayana state capital of Chandigarh.