During his first visit to Ahmedabad, Aryan Asari (17), a resident of Gujarat’s Aravalli district, couldn’t control his excitement as he watched airplanes flying from a very low height and recorded them through his mobile phone to show them to his friends back at home. However, he had no idea that he would accidentally capture the tragic aircraft accident which killed 241 people travelling on-board.
Aryan was visiting his relatives in Ahmedabad who lived in the Omkar Nagar area of Meghani Nagar, where Air India’s London-bound flight AI-171 crashed on Thursday and spread a wave of shock across the nation. The Class-12 student, out of sheer excitement, recorded videos of the airplanes and one of them captured the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft which started descending soon after take-off and crashed into the BJ Medical College’s hostel, a few hundred metres away from Aryan.
The video recorded by Aryan soon became the first and only live video of the plane crash before another CCTV footage from Ahmedabad Airport also surfaced. However, multiple conspiracy theories erupted after the video went viral on social media with some users questioning whether the accident, that was about to happen, was already known to the person behind the camera.
Bringing an end to the conspiracy theories, Aryan spoke to the media on Saturday wherein he confessed that he was just recording the video to show it to his friends in his native village and it was pure coincidence that he recorded the plane crashing. “The way the plane was lowering towards the ground, I thought it was landing at the airport but the explosion cleared my misunderstanding,” he said.
The incident scared the teenager who was seeing the airplanes from a close distance for the first time. “I always wished to fly in an airplane once in my life but after what I saw I don’t think I will be able to sit in one,” he had said to the media.
However, as media personnel started flocking to interview him, the police had to arrive at the site and escort him to a safe place, which sparked allegations that he was detained for recording the video. Ahmedabad Police refuted the allegations and posted on X saying, “Nobody was arrested for recording the video. He came to record his statement as a witness, along with his father. He was sent back with his father. There has been no detention or arrest.”
The Free Press Journal tried to contact Aryan but his phone was switched off. Sources said that the police had asked him to refrain from talking to the media and had been shifted to some other location.
