Bodies of three naval officers, one sailor found
DEHRADUN: The mortal remains of three Indian Navy officers and a sailor, who were part of a mountaineering expedition, were recovered on Saturday from the site of an avalanche at Mt Trishul in the western Kumaun region of Uttarakhand, officials said.
They said all-out efforts were continuing to locate the fifth naval climber and a Sherpa, who were among the six missing since Friday.
The deceased Navy personnel are Lt Commander Rajnikant Yadav, Lt Commander Yogesh Tiwari, Lt Commander Anant Kukreti and sailor Hari Om, the officials said.
A multi-agency team was deployed to carry out search and rescue operations.
The 20-member expedition was flagged off at Mumbai on September 3 and 10 climbers had started the final leg of their journey to the summit of Mt Trishul (7,120 m) on Friday morning but were caught in the avalanche.
A three-member National Institute of Mountaineering (NIM) team led by its principal Col Amit Bisht had left for the spot on Friday after receiving information about the incident.
Bisht, who had stationed with the two other team members at a camp a few km from the spot, said, “On Friday, the team couldn’t commence the rescue operation due to bad weather. On Saturday morning, the weather condition didn’t improve but we carried an aerial inspection in a chopper during which four bodies were spotted.”
“The spot, where the bodies were seen, is at a high altitude. Plus the weather was also not suitable to enable us to move towards the spot. Hence, we are waiting for the weather to improve so that we could leave for the spot to recover the bodies,” said Bisht.
According to another official privy to the matter, a high altitude expert team has been called from Kashmir to help in the search and rescue team. “They are expected to reach Uttarakhand soon.”
The six people went missing after an avalanche hit their summit of Mt Trishul on Friday morning. Mount Trishul is a group of three peaks that resembles a trident the weapon of Lord Shiva in the western Kumaon Himalayas in Bageshwar district, 320 km from Dehradun. The expedition had gone to scale the highest of the three peaks - Trishul-1 - at 7,120m.
According to the officials, the
THE SIX PEOPLE WENT MISSING AFTER AN AVALANCHE HIT THEIR SUMMIT OF MT TRISHUL ON FRIDAY MORNING
incident happened on Friday around 5 am when the team left to scale the peak from “camp-3”.
Earlier on September 24, an expedition of the army to scale Satopanth peak in Gangotri National Park, found the body of a mountaineer on who was part of an expedition of the army sent to scale the same peak in 2005 in which few mountaineers had gone missing.
Satopanth peak, which is 7,075m high, is the second highest peak in Gangotri National
Park situated in the Garhwal Himalayas in the state.
This is not the first time trekkers have gone missing in the state in the last three years. In September 2019, a 37-year-old Hungarian mountaineer Peter Wittek had gone missing during an expedition to 7120-metrehigh Mount Trishul located in Garhwal Himalayas in Chamoli district. The missing mountaineer was part of the six-member Singaporean-vietnamese-hungarian-mauritian mountaineering expedition to Mount Trishul between September 13 to October 8.
In June 2019, eight mountaineers heading for the summit near Nanda Devi East in Uttarakhand’s Pithoragarh met with an accident during an avalanche. Nanda Devi is the second-highest mountain in India.
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