57-year-old general survives helicopter crash, then swims for 12 hours to escape (photos)

Serge Gelle survived miraculously unharmed after a plane crashed into the northeast of the island nation on Monday.

He and a police colleague had arrived in the coastal town of Mahambo on Tuesday morning.

Gelle was spotted in the water by fishermen in a small boat who helped her get ashore, officials announced.

The other passenger, Officer Jimmy Laitsara, swam himself ashore.

Gelle, 57, appeared in several videos on social media as he lay on the beach exhausted from his camouflaged uniform. His hands were pale and wrinkled from the water and cold.

“It was not yet time for me to die,” the general said, adding that he felt cold but was not injured.

“But I’m not sad because I know my friends are alive. There were four of us in the helicopter. “I was sitting behind the pilot,” he said of the crash on Monday evening.

“We did not have a life jacket, I removed the seat belt and used it as a commode. I stayed calm and removed everything heavy that I had like boots or waist belt, I did everything to stay alive. “

The two survivors had managed to get out of their helicopter seats, said port authority head Jean-Edmond Randrianantenaina.

The search for the other two passengers on board is still ongoing.

It is not yet known what caused the crash of the aircraft, which was sending the police chief to inspire the scene of the overturning of a ship.

Gelle was going to visit the disaster on the northeast coast which is already learned to have claimed the lives of 64 people.

The cargo ship France sank on Monday while transporting 138 people illegally.

Local police chief Zafisambatra Ravoavy praised the police general’s determination.

“He has always been resistant to sports and still continues to be in shape as a thirty-year-old. “It has nerves of steel.”

Gelle became a minister as part of a government rotation in August after serving for three decades in the police.

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