Two days after an avalanche hit Gulmarg in Jammu and Kashmir,killing 17 Army personnel at a military base there,three Army jawans were killed on Wednesday in a series of avalanches in Siachen Glacier in the northern part of the state. The jawans were killed in two avalanches that hit the southern glacier and the base camp of Siachen today, an Army spokesperson from Srinagar said over phone. After heavy snowfall early in the morning,the two avalanches were reported in quick succession around 9.30 am in which Sepoy Stanzin from Leh,Naik Shewang from Kargil and Havildar Patluram from Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh were killed. Since during this time of the year avalanches are reported in Siachen,there were warnings already in place and inter-camp movement was banned. But unfortunately these three jawans were caught in the avalanches while they ventured out of their bunkers within their camps. The other personnel in both the places are safe and there are no injured, he added. Elsewhere in the state,three pilgrims to Vaishno Devi have been reported dead in the past 24 hours as rains,snowfall and hailstorm continued to lash the state on Wednesday. Of the deceased,two 70-year-old Parvati Bunkar and middle-aged Rajinder Singh belonged to Maharashtra whereas the third,58-year-old woman Suman Kumar,hailed from Ambala in Haryana. The police have attributed the deaths to the inclement weather. Earlier in the day,the police rescued 43 labourers of the State Forest Corporation who were trapped in snow avalanche in far off Padder area of Kishtwar district even as the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway remained closed for the fifth consecutive day following a high alert for avalanche by Snow Avalanche Study Establishment. The authorities shifted hundreds of people from high altitude areas in Anantnag,Kupwara and Baramulla to safer places as intense cold conditions revived with night temperature plummeting to sub-zero levels in parts of Jammu and Kashmir. Meanwhile,in the adjoining Himachal Pradesh,three persons were buried alive and an equal number injured when an avalanche struck a remote mountainous village in Pangi valley on Wednesday. As many as 13 houses in Hudan Bhatori village in Chamba district were damaged by the avalanche,Resident Commissioner (Pangi valley) Gopal Chand said. (With PTI,Srinagar,Chamba)
