Nepali police and local volunteers have found the bodies of about 100 trekkers and villagers buried in an avalanche set off by last month's devastating earthquake.
The bodies were recovered at Langtang village, 40 miles north of Kathmandu, which is on a trekking route popular with Westerners. The entire village, which includes 55 guesthouses for trekkers, was wiped out by the avalanche.
"Local volunteers and police personnel are digging through six-feet (deep) snow with shovels looking for more bodies," said Gautam Rimal, assistant chief district officer in the area where Langtang is located.
The dead include at least seven foreigners but only two had been identified, he said.
It was not clear how many people were in Langtang at the time of the avalanche but other officials said about 120 more people could be buried under the snow.
"We had not been able to reach the area earlier because of rains and cloudy weather," Uddhav Bhattarai, the district's senior bureaucrat, said .
The April 25 earthquake has killed 7,366 people and wounded nearly 14,500, Nepal's government said.
The government has asked foreign teams to wrap up search and rescue operations, now that there is no hope of finding people alive in the rubble.
"They can leave. If they are also specialists in clearing the rubble, they can stay," Rameshwor Dangal, an official at Nepal's home said.
The chief of India's National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), which was among the first foreign organisations to arrive after the quake, said it had been asked by the Nepalese government to conclude its search and rescue operation.
"All the search and rescue teams, not the relief (teams) ... have been asked to return," NDRF Director General O.P. Singh told Indian television. "We will see how best it can be done."
At least 18 of the deaths were on Mount Everest, where avalanches hit the slopes of the world's highest peak. Nepal says it had not closed the mountain to climbers, though the route up to the peak was damaged.
"Climbers at base camp don't think the route will be fixed anytime soon," said Tulsi Prasad Gautam, a senior official at Nepal's tourism department. "It's up to the climbers and the organisers who are at base camp to take a decision: we are not asking them to do one thing or another."
US military aircraft and personnel have arrived in Nepal to help ferry relief supplies to stricken areas outside the capital.
The contingent comprised eight aircraft, including one Huey and two C-130s, and between 100 and 120 personnel,.
The UN said it was looking at a wider array of options for getting supplies to people in the most remote areas, including transporting provisions on the ground through India.
"We are still having problems getting things to people," said Orla Fagan, a spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "There are people in very, very remote mountain villages."
The UN has said eight million of Nepal's 28 million people were affected by the quake, with at least two million needing tents, water, food and medicines over the next three months.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article