Six people, including four children, were killed in three separate avalanches in Indian Kashmir on Thursday as thousands of motorists remained stranded on a highway due to heavy snowfall, police said.
The four children were killed when the avalanche struck their house in the village of Darhalta, 200km south-east of Jammu, police said.
Two other people were killed by the avalanches, one in Londi village, 187km south-east of Jammu, and one in nearby Reasi village.
Meanwhile, the Indian air force airlifted soldiers stranded on the Jammu-Srinagar highway, which has been closed the past five days due to the heavy snow and landslides, wing commander Vivek Savelkar said.
He also said the air force started dropping food packets to more than 3 000 people, including women and children, stranded on a treacherous 50km stretch of the highway between the high-altitude Jawahar tunnel and Ramban.
Police said helicopters also made five sorties to airlift more than 100 women, children and elderly stranded passengers from the Banihal area.
”They were taken to Ramban, from where they can drive to Jammu,” the spokesperson said.
The blocked Himalayan region’s main highway is the only road conduit for food and fuel supplies to reach the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley.
On Monday, seven Indian troopers died when avalanches smashed into their mountain huts near Jawahar Tunnel, 100km south of Srinagar.
Overnight, the bodies of two more troopers who had been missing since Monday’s avalanches were found by tracker dogs and men from the army, a police spokesperson said on Thursday.
”The search is on for few more missing troops,” he said.
In the adjoining Dooru village, three family members were killed in another avalanche on Tuesday, while an elderly Kashmiri died of cold inside a stranded bus on the same day.
Some of the stranded people have been housed in three villages, government offices and few of the army camps en route. Others have hired hotels, while many are still confined to their vehicles.
Bad weather has been hampering men and machines working to clear the highway of accumulated snow with drifts in some areas as high as 2,5m.
Major portions of the 300km main highway pass through the foothills of Himalayas and are prone to landslides and avalanches. — Sapa-AFP