A party of 41 mountaineers was struck by an avalanche on Tuesday, leaving at least four people dead and a number of others missing in the Indian Himalayas, according to the mountaineering institute in northern India.
On their way down from a peak in the northern state of Uttarakhand, the 34 trainees and seven instructors were practicing navigation when they were struck. Rescuers said that eight members of the group are thought to have been saved while the others are still stranded in a crevasse.
Rain and snow have caused the search to be suspended for the evening. According to local media sources, the number of fatalities could drastically increase.
Trainees from the adjacent Nehru Institute of Mountaineering made up the group. According to the report, the avalanche happened as they were traveling back from Mount Draupadi Danda-2 (5,670m; 18,602 ft).
On Tuesday, at about 09:30 local time (04:00 GMT), authorities were informed, according to the rescuers. "We have confirmation of four deaths out of the 33 people trapped. Around eight of them have already been rescued and the rest are trapped in a crevasse," Ridhim Aggarwal from the State Disaster Response Force said. wsvAs long as the weather permits, rescue operations will go on, he said.
According to the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, a division of the defense ministry, four dead were found in the region while representatives of the state and federal disaster response agencies and the Indian air force searched the area.
Earlier, Uttarakhand police chief Ashok Kumar remarked, "The Indian Air Force is doing an aerial recce of the mountain where this happened. It is not easy to reach the spot."
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh wrote on Twitter: "Deeply anguished by the loss of precious lives due to landslide which has struck the mountaineering expedition carried out by the Nehru Mountaineering Institute in Uttarkashi."
Pushkar Singh Dhami, the state's senior elected official, claimed that the Indian military and the national disaster response force also dispatched teams to assist with rescue operations. Two helicopters from the Indian air force were dispatched to look for the missing.
"It has happened for the first time in the history of Indian mountaineering that such a large group of trainee mountaineers has been killed in an avalanche," Amit Chowdhary, an official at the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation and a former Indian air force officer said.
It happened one week after the famous U.S. ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson's body was discovered in the Himalayas of Nepal. After reaching Mount Manaslu's top, Ms. Nelson, one of the greatest mountaineers of her generation, is said to have fallen into a large crevasse.
She vanished on the same day that an avalanche lower on the same summit claimed the life of one person and injured over a dozen others.
