…They didn’t bring down NAF helicopter
Air Vice Marshall (AVM) Gbolahan Adekunle (rtd), former Chief of Training and Operations and former Chief of Policy and Plans, Nigerian Air Force (NAF) headquarters has said that terrorists won’t win the war against insurgency, maintaining that they didn’t bring down NAF helicopter with AK 47 as they claimed.
The retired General who was on Arise TV on Thursday stressed that the claim by a terrorist group that it shot down the NAF helicopter on Monday is not true.
He said, “If we take the words of bandits or the words of the defence chief who is responsible for overseeing operations using taxpayers’ money to ensure that officers and men carry out their responsibilities in safety and come back safely. Which words should we believe? I’ve seen the clip that those bandits put on air. I listened to what they said in Hausa language, where they told Nigerians to fear God.
A bunch of people who will defile the corpses of dead individuals, are they the people we should take seriously? These people will take advantage of any opportunity to create the impression that they’re winning the war in the hearts and minds of Nigerians. The truth is that they cannot win the war.
“They continue to embarrass us occasionally, like they’ve just done now, but that is where it is going to end. We’re doing more flying now in terms of intensity than ever in the history of Nigeria. NAF was established in 1964. Between 1964 and five years ago, we’ve done less flying than has been done in the last five years in an attempt to bring this insurgency to an end.
Adekunle added, “As long as the intensity of your operations increases, the likelihood of something going wrong increases. Accidents happen everywhere.
“I want to assure the nation that NAF is on top of its game. They’re doing the very best possible in very difficult circumstances for the nation,” he said.
Responding to a question as to what kind of weather conditions could have caused the crash, he said, “For now I don’t have the specifics but there are so many things that can go wrong in an airplane.
“There are millions of linking components that make up what you see fly in the air. There might be failures due to fatigue, due to stress by any of those components, which can cause an air plane to come down.
“Of course, how well you’re able to manage it depends on a lot of factors. To say that an AK 47 brought down the helicopter is farfetched. They just stumbled on a situation and they want to capitalize on it. A lot of things could have been responsible for an aircraft going down,” Adekune added.
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