Indian authorities have recovered seven bodies from rivers flowing out of Nepal, believed to be victims of last week’s Himalayan floods, Ada Derana reported early on Saturday, citing AFP.
Four unidentified bodies were pulled from waterways in Maharajganj district in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Thursday. “We think they have been swept into India from Nepal following flash floods there,” district magistrate Gaurav Singh Sogarwal told the agency.
Three more were recovered in Kushinagar district, about 70 kilometres downstream of the border, a police official said. Both districts sit south of Nepal’s Chitwan region, among the worst-hit areas. Authorities are working to identify the remains.
Counted by no one
The seven are not included in any published toll. That matters more than it might appear, because the tolls themselves do not agree.
Three separate agencies have issued figures. Nepal’s Prime Minister’s Office put the confirmed dead at 469 with 977 missing, and Chinese authorities reported three deaths in Tibet with 558 missing — the arithmetic behind the “at least 472” carried in the AFP dispatch, and the numbers Al Jazeera reported on Friday. Nepal Police separately put the confirmed toll at 547 by Friday evening, while the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority has been reporting bodies recovered — 538 at its most recent count.
None of those three counts extends across the Indian border. Bodies carried into Uttar Pradesh are being handled by Indian district administrations, and unless they are identified and repatriated they will not enter Nepal’s ledger at all.
Update, August 29: all of the figures in this section have since been superseded. Nepal police now put the dead at 626, the disaster authority at 579, and the missing list has passed 2,400 across Nepal and Tibet. The seven bodies recovered in India remain outside every one of those counts.
Al Jazeera reported that 644 of the missing are foreign nationals and that about 1,550 people have been rescued.
Sri Lanka’s position
No Sri Lankan nationals have been reported among the casualties. Colombo confirmed as much earlier in the week and has pledged USD 1 million in disaster assistance.
Search work inside Nepal remains constrained. Operations near the Bhotekoshi were suspended when a debris-dammed lake began to overflow, and Kathmandu has since reversed its refusal of foreign rescue teams, clearing specialists from India, China, Australia and South Korea.
No verified Sri Lankan newsroom other than Ada Derana had filed the Indian recovery at the time of writing.
