
New Delhi: K Rammohan Naidu, Civil Aviation Minister on Tuesday said that there is "no manipulation or dirty business" happening in the investigation into the Air India Plane Crash that killed 260 people on June 12. His statement comes against the backdrop of concerns expressed in certain quarters about the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) probe into the fatal crash.Naidu said everyone has to wait for the final AAIB probe report to know what exactly happened. "There is no manipulation, or there is no dirty business, happening in the investigation. It is a very clean and very thorough process that we are doing according to the rules...," the minister said.Notably, Naidu was speaking on the sidelines of a book launch function in the national
capital.Earlier in September, the 91-year-old father of Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, one of the two pilots of Air India Flight AI 171, which crashed minutes after takeoff, claimed that investigators had visited him in August and suggested that his son had cut the plane’s engine fuel after liftoff.Pushkar Raj Sabharwal reportedly emailed the Federation of Indian Pilots, stating that AAIB officials visited his home on August 30 “under the pretext of offering condolences” and suggested that his son, Captain Sabharwal, was responsible for operating the fuel switches."During this interaction ... they went beyond their mandate - speaking in innuendos and insinuating, on the basis of selective CVR interpretation and a so-called 'layered voice analysis', that my son had moved the fuel control switches from RUN to CUTOFF after take-off," Pushkar Raj Sabharwal said in his email.Captain Sumeet Sabharwal,father has now demanded that the central government order a formal enquiry into the accident under Rule 12 of the Aircraft (Invesitgation of Accidents and Incidents) Rules, 2017.Under Rule 12, the central government may order a formal investigation into any Indian-registered aircraft accident if it deems such a probe necessary.