The Delhi High Court is listening to a case brought by a former Indian Air Force officer whose service was ended because of the BrahMos missile misfire. Tuesday, Additional Solicitor General Chetan Sharma, who was representing the Centre, told the court that the mistaken fire could have led to a war with Pakistan. He also said that the incident put India in an embarrassing position in front of the rest of the world.
On March 9, 2022, a BrahMos missile was fired by accident and landed in Pakistan’s territory. The jobs of three Indian Air Force (IAF) officers were ended after a Court of Inquiry (CoI) found that they didn’t follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), which led to the missile going off by accident.
One of the IAF officers had gone to court to fight his firing.
The IAF officer’s petition says that the accident happened during a simulation exercise done by the “A” Flight of the 2403 Guided Weapons Squadron as part of a scheduled inspection by a Command Air Staff Inspection Team.
He said he was sent to the Squadron as an Engineering Officer on the day of the incident. He said that he was only given professional and hands-on training for jobs that were purely maintenance-related. He said that as an Engineering Officer, he was never trained on how to run operations, which is the job of the CO and Ops Officer.
According to the officer, he wasn’t trained for the counts of blame that the Court of Inquiry put on him, and he followed all of the standard operating procedures. The former IAF officer said that his termination order was “malafide” and that he had no experience running operations or dealing with operational emergencies.
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