Army personnel carry out rescue work in Mahazgund village of the Gurez sector. Tribune Photo

Majid Jahangir

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, January 28

It is a tough task for the Indian Air Force (IAF) pilots flying Mi-17 helicopters from Srinagar every morning to retrieve bodies of 14 soldiers from the Gurez area that has received seven-ten feet snow. The inclement weather has been compelling them to return to their base without any success.The bodies of the soldiers, who died in snow avalanches, are lying at battalion headquarters at Neeru in the Gurez valley and helicopters have made umpteen sorties to access the area but to no avail.“We have been trying to airlift the bodies of the soldiers to Srinagar, but due to bad weather it could not happen,” said Srinagar-based defence spokesman Col Rajesh Kalia. “Due to bad weather, no helicopter could take off on Saturday,” the he said.An Army officer said any plan to carry the mortal remains of the soldiers to their respective native places depended on transporting the bodies from Gurez.The Gurez valley in Bandipora district, over 150 km from Srinagar, remains cut off from the rest of the Kashmir valley for most part of the winter because of heavy snowfall. On January 25, in two avalanches in the Gurez sector close to the Line of Control (LoC), the Army lost 14 of its soldiers.The Army had identified the soldiers killed in Gurez avalanches as a Naib Subedar Aram Singh Gurjar of Karoli, Rajasthan; Havaldar Vijay Kumar Shukla of Murena, Madhya Pradesh; Naik Ajit Singh of Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Sepoy Azad Singh of Uttar Pradesh, Sepoy Devander Kumar Soni of Madhya Pradesh, Sepoy Elaverson B of Tamil Nadu, Sepoy Nagaraju Mamidi of Andhra Pradesh, Sepoy Samundare Vikas of Maharashtra, Sepoy Sandeep Kumar of Karnataka, Sepoy Sanju Suresh Khandare of Maharashtra, Sepoy Sundar Pandi of Tamil Nadu, Sepoy Sunil Patel of Gujarat and Craftsman Ankur Singh of Haryana.However, a helicopter was able to transport the body of Major Amit Sagar from Sonamarg in central Kashmir’s Ganderbal district, to Srinagar and an IAF aircraft later took the body to Delhi late on Saturday. Major Sagar died in a snow avalanche on January 25 at Sonamarg in Ganderbal on January 25.