16 dead, 5 injured in Vietnam helicopter crash

Sixteen people were killed and five injured when a Vietnamese military helicopter crashed in the capital Hanoi on Monday during a training exercise, a top military official said. ‘The plane was carrying 21 people and it crashed during a parachute training exercise, killing 16 and injuring five others,’ Lieutenant General Vo Van Tuan, army deputy commander, said. The dead and injured were all military personnel, he said. ‘According to our preliminary investigation, the accident was due to technical problems. The weather was good and I can say that there was no act of sabotage,’ he added. The Russian-made Mi-171 chopper came down in the morning in the Thach That district, a sparsely-populated rural suburb in the west of the city. It appeared to run into difficulties before crashing into the ground and bursting into flames, an eyewitness said, according to AFP.