Pakistan’s military hoped for a miracle yesterday as rescue teams searched for 124 soldiers and 11 civilians buried by a Himalayan avalanche near the Indian border, with no sign of survivors more than 24 hours later.
The avalanche engulfed a Pakistani army battalion headquarters near a glacier early on Saturday, leaving snow up to 25m deep over an area 1km wide.
The victims are trapped in one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth, at an altitude of 4,500m near the Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram mountain range.
“Let’s hope for a miracle,” said a military official, who asked to remain anonymous.
Helicopter rescue teams and troops on the ground with sniffer dogs were racing against time.
“On Wednesday and Thursday, we expect cloudy conditions and some snow fall as well, which will make it difficult for any rescue operations to continue,” meteorologist Mohammed Hanif said on state TV.
The area is also one of the world’s most militarily tense frontiers, where the Indian and Pakistani armies have confronted each other over disputed territory for decades.
Eleven civilian employees of the military were buried under the snow along with the soldiers of the 6 Northern Light Infantry Battalion, the military said in a statement.
The army listed the names of the missing on its PR Web site, from officers to waiters to barbers.
The military has ruled Pakistan for more than half of its 64 year history, setting foreign and security policy even when civilian governments are in power, as is the case now.
Siachen is in the northern part of the Himalayan region of Kashmir. The no-man’s-land of Siachen is 6,000m above sea level. Military experts say the inhospitable climate and avalanche-prone terrain have claimed more lives than gunfire. Muslim-majority Kashmir is at the heart of hostility between India and Pakistan and was the cause of two of their three full-scale wars since independence from Britain in 1947.
Siachen has been described as the world’s highest battlefield. Indian and Pakistani troops have fought at altitudes of more than 6,096m in temperatures of minus-60oC.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of