100 Bodies Found in Nepal Trekking Village

Nepali police and local volunteers found the bodies of about 100 trekkers and villagers buried in an avalanche set off by last month’s devastating earthquake and were digging through snow and ice for signs of dozens more missing, officials said yesterday.

The bodies were recovered on Saturday and Sunday at the Langtang village, 60 kilometers (40 miles) north of Kathmandu, which is on a trekking route popular with Westerners. The entire village, which includes 55 guesthouses for trekkers, was wiped out by the avalanche, officials said.

“Local volunteers and police personnel are digging through six-feet (deep) snow with shovels looking for more bodies,” said. Gautam Rimal, assistant chief district officer in the area where Langtang is located. The dead include at least seven foreigners but only two had been identified, he said.

It was not clear how many people were in Langtang at the time of the avalanche but other officials said about 120 more people could be buried under the snow. “We had not been able to reach the area earlier because of rains and cloudy weather,” Uddhav Bhattarai, the district’s senior bureaucrat, said by telephone on Sunday.

The April 25 earthquake has killed 7,366 people and wounded nearly 14,500, Nepal’s government said. The government has asked foreign teams to wrap up search and rescue operations, now that there is no hope of finding people alive in the rubble.

“They can leave. If they are also specialists in clearing the rubble, they can stay,” Rameshwor Dangal, an official at Nepal’s home ministry, told Reuters yesterday. The chief of India’s National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), which was among the first foreign organizations to arrive after the quake, said it had been asked by the Nepalese government to conclude its search and rescue operation.

“All the search and rescue teams, not the relief (teams) ... have been asked to return,” NDRF Director General O.P. Singh told Indian television. “We will see how best it can be done.”

At least 18 of the deaths were on Mount Everest, where avalanches hit the slopes of the world’s highest peak. The government said on Monday that it had not closed the mountain to climbers, though the route up to the peak was damaged. “Climbers at base camp don’t think the route will be fixed anytime soon,” said Tulsi Prasad Gautam, a senior official at Nepal’s tourism department. “It’s up to the climbers and the organizers who are at base camp to take a decision: we are not asking them to do one thing or another.”