After 52 days of searching, Pakistan declares Siachen avalanche victims dead

Islamabad: The Pakistani military on Tuesday announced that all 139 personnel buried alive by an avalanche 52 days ago were dead and declared them ‘shuhada’ (martyrs).

It said efforts to recover all the bodies would continue. Only three bodies have so far been recovered from the remote glacier, dubbed the world’s highest battleground, despite desperate rescue efforts assisted by foreign teams, including from the United States.

The disaster struck an army camp at the entrance to the Siachen Glacier in Kashmir on April 7 and since then round the clock search operations, also assisted by foreign teams, have continued.

Excavation work is taking time due to constraints over terrain and weather, said a statement issued by the Inter-Services Public Relations department.

Three bodies have been recovered so far.

“The nature and magnitude of the calamity is suggestive of no probability of recovering any person alive. In this back drop, religious leaders of prominence from all sects and factions were consulted,” a statement said.

“From this deliberate exercise, it has been decided to declare the remaining brave soldiers as ‘shuhada’ and this is being done with mixed feelings of pride, grief and above all unflinching resolve to continue all out efforts to recover the bodies of all,” the statement said.

Rescuers have dug tunnels into the mass of snow and ice that hit the battalion headquarters of the sixth Northern Light Infantry to try to recover the bodies of 129 soldiers and 11 civilians at the Gayari camp.

The site is 4,000 metres high in the mountains, just below the glacier where Pakistani and Indian troops have faced off since the 1980s.

Kashmir has been the cause of two wars between India and Pakistan and the nuclear-armed rivals fought over Siachen in 1987, though guns on the glacier have largely fallen silent since a peace process began in 2004.