The bodies of an Indian man and his teenage daughter, who visited Nepal as tourists and have been missing since last month, were recovered from a mountainous area near a monastery on Sunday, police said.
The Armed Police Forces (APF) recovered the bodies of Jignesh Kumar Lallubhai Patel (52) and his daughter Priyadarshani (17), both residents of Kadud in Bardoli taluka in Surat, Gujarat, near Malirepa monastery in Desiang in Manang district, APF deputy spokesperson Shailendra Thapa said.
The duo had left the Gyalsen Hotel in Disyang on October 20, and informed the hotel staff that they were going to Malerepa Monastery.
When they failed to return, hotel staff informed the Nepal Mountain Rescue Training School in Manang and asked for help in locating them. Since initial searches by the training school yielded no results, a trained mountain rescue team led by DSP Hira Bahadur GC was dispatched with rescue equipment.
The team found the bodies buried under the snow at an altitude of 100 meters above the monastery. Police said it appeared that the tourists had visited the monastery and then moved up the hill to get a better view before the accident occurred. A few days ago, Patel’s wife contacted Surat district police and the government emergency operations center in Gandhinagar, seeking help in locating her husband and daughter. Jagruti, wife of Jignesh Patel, in her complaint filed with Bardoli police station in Kadud, stated that her husband and daughter left after October 15 and reached Nepal for mountain climbing. According to her, she had her last conversation with her husband on October 21. Jignesh told her that they had reached the base camp in the Annapurna Mountains in Nepal’s Manang district and would return to the base camp by October 30, according to Bardoli police sources.
(tags for translation) Tragedy of Gujarat tourists in Nepal
