30 May 2022: The Nepali Army has physically located the Tara Airlines plane crash site in the country’s Mustang district, its Spokesperson Brigadier General Narayan Silwal said on Monday. The crashed plane is at Sanosware, Thasang-2, Mustang.
A team led by Nepal Police inspector Raj Kumar Tamang reached the crash site by air. “Some of the bodies of the passengers are beyond recognition. Police gathering the remains,” the official said.
Search and rescue teams are on their way by both the air and land to the crash site, Chief District Officer of Mustang, Netra Prasad Sharma, told news agency ANI earlier.
Authorities resumed search operations for the missing aricraft early Monday morning after they were halted due to bad weather and darkness on Sunday as the night fell. The turboprop Twin Otter 9N-AET plane had four Indian nationals, two Germans and 13 Nepali passengers besides a three-member Nepali crew.
Officials on Sunday said the fate of 22 people on board the plane remained unclear as bad weather made it difficult to locate the aircraft that went missing in the mountainous region of the Himalayan nation minutes after taking off from the tourist city of Pokhara.
The condition of the plane belonging to Tara Air that took off at 10:15 am from Pokhara, nearly 200 kilometers east of Kathmandu, is unknown till now, the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) said in a statement.
The plane took off in the morning for a 20-minute flight but lost contact with the control tower five minutes before it was due to land.
“The search operation has been suspended for today because of the darkness,” police spokesperson Bishnu Kumar K.C told Reuters on Sunday. “We could not make any progress. The search will resume early tomorrow.”
The airline said the plane was carrying four Indians, two Germans and 16 Nepalis, including three crew.
The plane departed from the tourist town of Pokhara, 125 km (80 miles) west of the capital, Kathmandu. It was headed for Jomsom, which is about 80 km (50 miles) northwest of Pokhara and is a popular tourist and pilgrimage site.
State-owned Nepal Television said villagers had seen an aircraft on fire at the source of the Lyanku Khola River at the foot of the Himalayan mountain Manapathi, in a district bordering Tibet.
“Ground search teams are proceeding toward that direction,” Tara Air spokesperson Sudarshan Gartaula told Reuters, referring to the fire site. “It could be a fire by villagers or by cowherds. It could be anything.”
The Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) also said a team was headed to that area.
