Kathmandu, December 16: All 22 passengers and crew on board a small passenger plane that crashed in mountainous eastern Nepal were killed, police said on Thursday, after a rescue team reached the site.
“We have recovered 20 bodies. We are still searching for the other two, but we can be sure there are no survivors,” police spokesman Bigyan Raj Sharma said following the crash on Wednesday afternoon.
“The aircraft has broken up completely and is scattered over 200 metres of dense forest.”
The airline, Tara Air, has said one of the passengers is an American citizen, although the US embassy was not immediately able to confirm this.
The others were initially said to be Nepalese, but reports on Thursday suggested they may be Bhutanese pilgrims who claimed to be locals to qualify for a cheaper air fare.
Khotang, the district in eastern Nepal the plane took off from, is not a major tourist destination, but it is home to two sites of religious significance, a Hindu temple and a Buddhist monastery.
Air travel is popular in impoverished Nepal, which has only a very limited road network. Many communities, particularly in the mountains and hills, are accessible only on foot or by air.
Aviation accidents are relatively common, particularly during the summer monsoon, when visibility is usually at its worst.
Last month, a helicopter crashed near Mount Everest during a mission to rescue two stranded climbers, killing the pilot and an engineer.
In August, a plane headed for the Everest region crashed in bad weather killing all 14 people on board, including four Americans, a Japanese and a British national.
An investigation blamed the crash on a power failure. It said the plane’s generator failed and the pilot did not follow the proper procedures to conserve the remaining battery power.
Tara Air is a subsidiary of Yeti Airlines, a privately owned domestic airline founded in 1998 which runs a service to many far-flung destinations across Nepal.
Yeti’s last major accident was in 2008 when a passenger plane crashed on landing at Lukla airport, the gateway to Mount Everest, killing all 19 people on board, most of them German tourists.
—–Agencies