SOURCE: Washington post
Eight Taiwanese military officers, including the chief of the general staff, were killed Thursday when a Black Hawk helicopter crashed while transporting them to a new-year inspection at a military base on the island’s east coast. The crash came barely a week before general elections that are likely to return independence-leaning President Tsai Ing-wen to power. Tsai’s campaign office said she would suspended electioneering for three days so she could respond to the incident in her capacity as commander in chief of the armed forces.
“My deepest condolences go out to the outstanding servicemen lost in today’s helicopter crash, as well as their families,” Tsai wrote on Twitter. “We will do everything we can to help their families in this time of loss & investigate the cause of the crash.”
Thirteen people were on board the UH-60M Black Hawk, part of the Air Force Rescue Team, which took off from Songshan air force base in Taipei just before 8 a.m. It was headed for a military base in Dongao, in the northeast, as part of an inspection before the Lunar New Year holiday later this month, Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported.
The helicopter disappeared from radar screens about 10 minutes after takeoff, crashing in a mountainous area between the capital and the coast.
It was not clear what caused the crash of the Black Hawk, sold to Taiwan’s military by the United States in 2010, but local media said that the pilot had reported weather as an issue shortly before the chopper lost contact.
Photos from the scene showed the mangled helicopter amid broken tree trunks on a foggy hillside.
The Ministry of National Defense confirmed that the chief of the general staff, Gen. Shen Yi-ming, was among the dead. Shen, who was 62, had commanded Taiwan’s air force until six months ago, when he became chief of the general staff, putting him in charge of the self-ruled island’s defense against China.
China considers Taiwan to be a breakaway province and, under leader Xi Jinping, has been making increasingly aggressive suggestions about using force to “reunify” the country, although Taiwan has never been part of the Communist-ruled People’s Republic.
In a speech a year ago, Xi said he would not rule out using force to take Taiwan.
Successive American presidents since Richard Nixon have adhered to Beijing’s one-China policy and acknowledged its position that Taiwan is part of China. But the United States has continued to sell arms to Taiwan to help the democratic island fend off the threat of attack from Chinese Communist forces.
The Obama administration struck a deal in 2010 to sell Taiwan $6.4 billion worth of weaponry, including 60 UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters and 114 Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missile-defense interceptors.
But the Trump administration, fighting a trade war with China, announced a larger deal, pledging in August to sell $8 billion worth of F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan, the largest and most significant sale of weaponry to the island in decades.
Five people survived Thursday’s crash and were rescued, according to local media reports.
Among the dead were two major generals: Yu Chin-wen, deputy director of the Political Warfare Bureau, and Hung Hung-chin, from the Defense Ministry’s office of the deputy chief of the general staff for intelligence, the South China Morning Post quoted Taiwanese air force commander Hsiung Hou-chi as saying. A lieutenant colonel, a captain, a major and two senior master sergeants were also killed, the paper reported.
Han Kuo-yu, the candidate for the conservative Kuomintang who is running against Tsai in the Jan. 11 presidential election, said his campaign was “praying with all our hearts for the victims.”
“I want to express my condolences to the victims again and hope that all of us in the country can pray for them together,” he wrote in a Facebook post.a
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