By Emmanuel Obisue
Nigerian Air Force, NAF, has buried its pilot who paid the supreme price during a combat mission in the Northeast.
Flight Lieutenant Ebiakpo Chapele was buried with full honours at the Military Cemetery in Abuja on Thursday at a private ceremony, with only colleagues, friends and family in attendance, as it was not publicly announced by NAF.
Before his burial, DNA verification was reportedly done to confirm that the remains were that of Chapele, after which the family was able to have closure.
“Today we finally bury a son, a beloved brother,uncle & husband. A patriot who since he was taught about Gowon/Ironsi in pry 6 insisted we start calling him ‘Major’ cos he’d serve Nigeria.” the pilot’s sister Tracy Chapele said on Twitter.
It would be recalled that two Flight Lieutenants were conducting a mission in support of the counter-insurgency operations on March 31 2021, when their aircraft disappeared from radar and went down in the infamous Sambisa forest, a former stronghold of the Boko Haram terror group.
At the time of the incident, the Nigerian Air Force had said that an “extensive search and rescue effort” was going on, by ground and air.
On March 26 this year, it was announced that soldiers on a clearance patrol as part of a large-scale offensive in Sambisa named ‘Operation Desert Sanity’, discovered the wreckage of an Airforce Alpha Jet with the designation NAF 475, Chapele and Abolarinwa’s plane.
