Avalanche kills Himalayan mountaineers
An avalanche on the slopes of Mount Panchachuli in northern India has killed seven mountaineers of a nine-member expedition team.
Officials on Sunday said that the two remaining mountaineers were also missing. They were all caught up in a snow storm as they descended the 13,920-foot peak.
“Seven bodies were recovered and two others are still missing. Rescue teams cannot go up because of the poor weather,” Navin Chander Sharma of the Indo-Tibetian Police Force said.
The ill-fated climbers all served in the Indo-Tibetan Force, a paramilitary group specialising in mountain terrain.
Most were experienced climbers and two of them, including expedition leader Sanjay Singh, had scaled the world’s tallest peak Mount Everest, earlier.
A massive sheet of snow slid down from the summit of Panchachuli on Saturday, when the mountaineers lost contact with their base camp, officials said.