After five days of rescue efforts bodies of five Bengal trekkers recovered, guide Khalif Singh still missing
On Tuesday, bodies of five trekkers from West Bengal were retrieved from the Sundardhunga glacier in Uttarakhand’s Bageshwar district. It took five days of rescue efforts from the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) to recover the bodies of the five who went missing while trekking. The rescue team is still on search to locate the missing guide Khilaf Singh, a resident of Jakuni village of the district’s Kapkot sub division.
The dead trekkers have been identified as 27-year-old Pritam Roy, who was a doctor by profession and 27-year-old Sagar Dey, who was a homeopathy practitioner while 63-year-old Sadan Basak was a retired Income Tax officer. The other two trekkers, 32-year-old Chandra Sekhar Das and 35-year-old Sarit Shekhar Das were all residents of Ranaghat in Nadia district of West Bengal.
"The 13-member rescue team consisting of NDRF and SDRF personnel on Tuesday reached Devi Kund near the Sundardhunga glacier where five bodies had earlier been spotted and retrieved all of them," Bageshwar district magistrate Vineet Kumar said. "The bodies have been sent to Kapkot for post-mortem," he said. The bodies were later handed to the relatives and will be taken to Delhi from where they would be flown to Kolkata for their last rites.
The rescue efforts were initiated after a porter Harak Singh returned from the trek and informed the administration that his team members had been caught in a snowstorm. On Monday, Khalif Singh’s brother Anand met Bageshwar DM and requested the authorities to speed up the search operations. On Friday, the bodies were spotted through aerial surveillance but because of the bad weather the rescue operations get delayed for several days.
Photo Courtsy: ANI
The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now.