The wreckage of a US military helicopter lost on an earthquake relief mission in Nepal was found on Friday high on a mountainside, with all eight on board presumed dead, US officials said. A US search team identified the wreckage as that of the missing Marines UH-1Y Huey helicopter deployed after the Himalayan state was hit by a massive earthquake last month that killed more than 8,000 people.
Crash debris was found 8 miles (13 km) north of the town of Charikot near dense forest and rugged terrain "It was a very severe crash. We believe there were no survivors," said John Wissler, lieutenant general of the US Marines.
The Huey went missing while it was distributing aid on Tuesday, the day a strong aftershock hit Nepal and killed more than 100 people. Six Marines and two Nepali soldiers were on board when it went missing, after the crew was heard over the radio saying the aircraft was experiencing a fuel problem. The Huey, an iconic helicopter dating back to the Vietnam War era, was completely destroyed, Nepal's top defence ministry official said.
"As the helicopter has broken into pieces and totally crashed there is no chance of any survivors," Nepal's defence secretary Ishwori Prasad Paudyal said earlier on Friday. After a three-day search the Huey was spotted near the village of Ghorthali at an altitude of 11,200 ft (3,400 m), an army general told Reuters earlier, as helicopters and Nepali ground troops converged on the crash site. "It was found on a steep slope," Major General Binoj Basnet said. US and Nepali teams investigated the site on Friday in an attempt to determine the cause of the crash.
On Saturday, US and Nepalese aircraft plan to get their rescue team back up to the site to collect the bodies and begin identification of the charred remains. The first quake, which struck on April 25 with a magnitude of 7.8, has killed 8,199 people. The death toll from a 7.3 aftershock on Tuesday has reached 117, with many victims in Dolakha.