Rescue teams have located this Monday 21 bodies of the 22 people aboard the Tara Air company plane that crashed this Sunday in western Nepal, official sources have informed Efe.
Ten bodies have been transferred to Kathmandu by the Nepalese emergency services, another ten remain at the accident site and efforts are being made to recover the lifeless body already sighted of another victim of the incident, the spokesman for the Authority told Efe. Nepal Civil Aviation, Deo Chandra Lal Karna.
In addition, Karna has added that the search for the body of another victim of the accident continues. The rescue teams have located the first bodies this morning after more than twenty hours trying to find the remains of the plane due to bad weather and nightfall, which had forced them to stop operations, the spokesman for Yeti Airlines, the parent company of Tara Air, Sudarshan Badtaula.
The place of the accident has been identified in the district of Mustang (northwest) at more than 4,000 meters high, and Batdaula has specified that the plane has crashed into the side of a mountain, scattering the bodies of the passengers in a radius of about a hundred meters. The spokesman for the Nepalese Army, Narayan Silwal, has shared on Twitter an image of the scene of the incident in which parts of the fuselage are seen in a mountainous area.
The Twin Otter 9N-AET plane belonging to the Nepalese airline Tara Air was flying from the central city of Pokhara to Jomsom airport in the Mustang district. It had taken off from Pokhara around 0955 local time (0410 GMT) and the authorities lost contact just ten minutes later, according to the Nepal Civil Aviation Authority. Thirteen Nepalese, four Indians, two Germans and three crew members were traveling in it.
Located in the heart of the Himalayas, Jomsom is a popular destination among foreign tourists visiting the Annapurna (8,091 meters) or the Mustang region, as well as among Hindu pilgrims. The flight between Pokhara, a city located about 200 kilometers northwest of Kathmandu, and Jomsom takes just twenty minutes, but it is known for its technical difficulty.
The route has a long history of accidents, including one in August 1998 when a Lumbini Airways airliner crashed on takeoff from Jomsom, killing all 18 passengers. Another 18 people died in a similar accident in 2002 aboard a Shangri-La Air Twin Otter, while one of the worst events took place in February 2016 when all 23 passengers on a Tara Air flight died in the route between Jomsom and Pokhara.
Nepal, with frequent air accidents, has been the subject of repeated international sanctions for the lack of controls. The European Union has banned access to its territory to Nepalese airlines since 2013. The most serious air accident in recent years in Nepal occurred in March 2018, when a plane from the Bangladeshi airline US-Bangla, coming from Dhaka, crashed It crashed during the landing maneuver at the Kathmandu international airport with 67 passengers and four crew members on board, leaving fifty dead.
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