Remains airlifted to Chd 56 yrs after An-12 crash

Kullu: The remains of four soldiers, recovered last week from the Chandrabhaga-13 mountain in Himachal Pradesh’s Lahaul Spiti district more than five decades after their Indian Air Force An-12 aircraft had crashed in 1968, were on Wednesday airlifted to Chandigarh after autopsy.
Army helicopters took off from the the Spiti valley’s Losar helipad with the remains. An official from the local administration has confirmed that a medical team was present on Tuesday evening when the Army expedition brought the remains to Losar to be sent to the soldiers’ respective villages for cremation.

On Sept 29, more than 56 years after the crash that had claimed 102 lives, the Dogra Scouts had found these bodies on the CB-13 mountain’s Dhaka glacier on the fifth day of their search mission.
Lahaul-Spiti’s superintendent of police, Mayank Chaudhary, described how the soldiers — sepoy Narayan Singh from Pauri Garhwal, sepoy Munshi Ram from Haryana’s Rewari, craftsman Thomas Cherian from Kerala’s Kollam, and Malkhan Singh from Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh — were identified from their badges and personal articles found on the site. The Army matched those with its records from the crash day and communicated with the families about the findings.
On Feb 7, 1968, the Army had lost this An-12 to bad weather over the Rohtang Pass shortly after the takeoff from Chandigarh for Leh.
In 2003, mountaineers had first discovered the aircraft’s wreckage along with a soldier’s remains and subsequent searches in 2007 and 2018 led to the recovery of more bodies.
In 2019, the Dogra Scouts found the An-12’s engine and cockpit door. So far, nine bodies have been recovered.
The latest search operation will conclude on Oct 10.