KATHMANDU: 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.
The bodies were recovered on Saturday and Sunday at the Langtang village, 60 km 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.
“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 7 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.
In other parts of the Himalayan nation, three people were pulled alive from the rubble of their home on Sunday, eight days after the earthquake, while several media outlets reported that a 101-year-old man was found alive in the rubble on Saturday.
US military aircraft and personnel arrived in Nepal on Sunday and were due to begin helping ferry relief supplies to stricken areas outside the capital.
The UN has said 8 million of Nepal’s 28 million people were affected by the quake, with at least 2 million needing tents, water, food and medicines. (Agencies)
