150 Rescued From Tunnel After Avalanches in India

NEW DELHI —  At least 150 people stranded in a tunnel in the Himalayas for up to five days by avalanches struggled to safety through eight-foot-deep snows Friday after rescuers managed to reach them, said police in India’s northern state of Jammu and Kashmir.

The other 48 people who had sought shelter in the 1.5-mile-long tunnel emerged as well and were being housed in army barracks nearby. They will probably be brought out today, police spokesman Abdul Roof said from the city of Srinagar.

This week, a series of avalanches, the heaviest on record along the 200-mile, one-lane national highway between Srinagar and the city of Jammu to the south, prompted fears of great loss of life. But Roof insisted Friday evening that no more than 57 bodies had been recovered.

“Please do not get carried away by newspaper reports on the death figure,” Roof said in a telephone interview.

At the same time, Indian media were adamantly quoting officials in the state as saying they knew of at least 150 deaths. On Thursday, the initial word from officials and the media had been that at least 133 bodies had been found.

The moving walls of snow blocked hundreds of cars, buses and trucks on the mountainous road, the only link between the strategic Kashmir valley and the rest of the country. Officials worried that people in vehicles had been swept off precipitous slopes to their death.

By Friday, a state government spokesman said that search parties, including units from the Indian army, air force, Indo-Tibetan Border Police and Border Security Force had rescued nearly 5,400 people.

Two buses and four small sedans, along with more than 120 people they had been carrying, were still missing.

Concern had focused on the motorists and bus passengers who had holed up in the tunnel, 7,260 feet above sea level, to survive the snowslides and subfreezing temperatures.

Rescue crews on Thursday said the snows near the tunnel were too high for them to land helicopters.

An adviser to the state governor, Lt. Gen. M.A. Zaki, and an accompanying party managed to get through by road to the northern entrance, said Mustaq Ahmed, an inspector in the police control room at Jammu.

Zaki’s party packed down the snow so people could leave on foot via the northern entrance, Ahmed said. In the morning, he said, rescue aircraft dropped snow boots, socks, axes, shawls and blankets on both sides of the tunnel to help equip people for a hike.

Fifty-one of them struggled through snow seven to eight feet deep to reach a village to the north of the tunnel, where the Kashmir valley begins, Roof said. They were brought by road to Srinagar, 58 miles away, and put up in a special relief camp.

Meanwhile, on the southern side, about 100 people exited and trudged through deep snow to the village of Nowgam, about 2 1/2 miles away, Ahmed said.