Closure for family as body found 56 years after India plane crash
It was a phone call that brought an end to a wait of 56 years and eight months.
The call, from a police station in Pathanamthitta district in Kerala, southern India, delivered unexpected news to Thomas Thomas: the body of his older brother, Thomas Cherian, had finally been found.
Cherian, an army craftsman, was one of 102 passengers on an Indian Air Force aircraft that crashed in the Himalayas in 1968 after encountering severe weather.
The plane disappeared while flying over the Rohtang Pass, which connects Himachal Pradesh to Indian-administered Kashmir.
For decades, the IAF AN-12 aircraft was considered missing, its fate unknown.
In 2003, a team of mountaineers discovered the body of one passenger.
Over the years, army search teams found eight more bodies, and in 2019, the wreckage of the plane was located in the mountains.
A few days ago, the 1968 crash made headlines again when the army recovered four more bodies, including Cherian’s.
Upon hearing the news, the family felt as if “the suffocation of 56 years had suddenly lifted,” Thomas told BBC Hindi.
“I could finally breathe again,” he said.
Cherian, the second of five siblings, was just 22 when he went missing. He was on his way to his first field posting in Leh, in the Himalayas.
It wasn’t until 2003, when the first body was recovered, that Cherian’s status was changed from missing to dead.
“Our father passed away in 1990, and our mother in 1998, both still waiting for news of their missing son,” Thomas said.
Altogether, only 13 bodies have been recovered until now from the site of the crash.
Harsh weather conditions and the icy terrain of the region make it hard for search teams to carry out expeditions there.
The bodies of Cherian and three others – Narayan Singh, Malkan Singh and Munshiram – were found 16,000ft above sea level near the Dhaka glacier. The latest operation was jointly conducted by the Dogra Scouts – a unit of the Indian army’s Dogra regiment – and members of the Tiranga Mountain Rescue.
Officials used satellite imagery, a Recco radar and drones to locate the bodies, says Colonel Lalit Palaria, commanding officer of the Dogra Scouts.
The Recco radar, which can detect metallic objects buried in the snow at depths of about 20m, identified debris from the aircraft in the area.
The team then manually dug through the wreckage and found one body.
Three more bodies were recovered from within the crevasses of the glacier.
It was the nametag on Cherian’s uniform – “Thomas C”, with only the C of his surname visible – along with a document in his pocket that helped officials identify him.
His family says that while the grief of losing him could never fade, they are relieved to finally get some closure.
On 3 October, officials handed over Cherian’s coffin, draped in the Indian flag, to his family. A funeral service was held at a church in their village Elanthoor, a day later.
Mr Thomas says that through all the years of waiting, army officials had told them that the search was still on and that they would let them know when they found Cherian’s body.
“We really appreciate that they kept us posted all these years,” he says, adding that many other members of the extended family had joined the armed forces even after Cherian’s disappearance.
Like the Odalil family, the relatives of the other soldiers whose bodies were found recently are also dealing with the grief and relief. Many of their closest relatives, including parents and spouses, died waiting for news of them.
In the northern state of Uttarakhand, Jaiveer Singh is still processing the news. He also received his uncle Narayan Singh’s body in early October.
Years after Narayan Singh went missing, his family lost hope. So with their consent, Singh’s wife, Basanti Devi, began a new life with one of his cousins. Jaiveer Singh was one of the children born of that relationship.
He says that for years, his mother held on to hopes of Narayan Singh’s return. She died in 2011.
“I don’t even have a photo of my uncle as a memory,” he says.
