Shimla: 50 years after an AN-12 aircraft of the Indian Air Force went missing somewhere over Himachal Pradesh, a mountaineering team has found the remains of one of the soldiers on board the plane.
On July 1, a body of one of the victims of 1968 Indian Air Force plane crash was found along with some parts of the aircraft at 6,200 metres above sea level. The remains at the Dhaka glacier base camp was spotted by a team of Indian Mountaineering Foundation who were on a clean-up expedition to the Chandrabhaga-13 peak.
Rajeev Rawat, the team leader of the expedition group, said that team members spotted parts of the aircraft the body of the soldier a few metres away from each other. They alerted the Army’s High Altitude Warfare School on July 16 which has a search operation in the area.
The AN-12-BL-534 aircraft which was flying from Chandigarh to Leh had mysteriously vanished in 1968. According to an Indian Express report, the aircraft carrying 98 defence personnel and 4 crew members had lost all contact with the ground control while flying over Rohtang pass.
Theflight was just about to land at its destination when orders were given out to the pilot from ground control to turn back due to bad weather conditions. After months of extensive search, there was no success in locating the plane or its wreckage. There were also theories of Pakistani involvement as many suspected that it might have drifted off into enemy territory.