New Delhi : Three Army personnel, including two Agniveers, lost their lives on Tuesday in a major avalanche at the Siachen base camp in Ladakh. A rescue operation was underway in Siachen, known as the “world’s highest battleground. The soldiers were of the Mahar regiment and hailed from Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand.
An Army captain was rescued. Avalanches are common at Siachen Glacier, located on the northern tip of the Line of Control at a height of around 20,000 feet. Temperatures regularly fall to -60 degrees Celsius. Earlier, two soldiers were killed in Siachen after an avalanche struck sub-sector Haneef. Other soldiers and porters were rescued after a six-hour-long operation.
Another massive avalanche in 2019 killed four soldiers and two porters. The avalanche struck a group of eight soldiers patrolling near a post at a height of 18,000 feet. The highest number of fatalities due to an avalanche happened in 2022, when seven soldiers died in the Kameng sector of Arunachal Pradesh.
The Army, for the first time, procured 20 avalanche rescue systems from a Swedish firm – a long-pending requirement amid a large number of soldiers getting killed in avalanches and landslides in the Siachen Glacier and other high-altitude areas of Kashmir and the Northeast.
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