All passengers from crashed plane feared dead, says Nepal officials

|HT|

A day after a private plane - with 22 on board, including four Indians - crashed in Nepal, the country's home ministry said that all passengers are feared dead. "We suspect all the passengers on board the aircraft have lost their lives. Our preliminary assessment shows that no one could have survived the plane crash, but official statement is due," Phadindra Mani Pokhrel, spokesperson said.

A team of 15 Nepali Army soldiers has been dropped near the crash site to retrieve the bodies. The crash site lies at an elevation of about 14,500 feet while the team has been dropped at 11,000 meters height, the army spokesperson said.

Fourteen bodies have been recovered so far from the wreckage of a plane that crashed into a mountainside after the search and rescue efforts resumed on Monday morning. "Fourteen bodies have been recovered so far, search continues for the remaining. The weather is very bad but we were able to take a team to the crash site. No other flight has been possible," civil aviation authority spokesman Deo Chandra Lal Karn said.

“Some of the bodies of the passengers are beyond recognition. Police gathering the remains," Tek Raj Sitaula, a spokesman for the Tribhuvan International Airport in Nepal's capital Kathmandu said. Pieces of the wreckage of the passenger plane that crashed on Sunday morning were found at 14,500ft in Sano Sware Bhir of Thasang in Mustang district in northwestern Nepal, after nearly 20 hours since the plane went missing, the Nepal Army said.

The crash site has been identified as Sanosware, Thasang-2, Mustang

Sudarshan Bartaula, a spokesperson of Tara Air, said that the bodies of 14 people have been found. “As the bodies have been scattered over a 100-metre radius from the main impact point, the search and rescue team is collecting them," said.

The airline issued the list of passengers which identified four Indians as Ashok Kumar Tripathy, his ex wife Vaibhavi Bandekar (Tripathy) and their children Dhanush and Ritika.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)