Source: BBC News [UK State Media]
“It was a phone call that ended a decades-long wait — of 56 years and eight months, to be precise. The caller, from a police station in Pathanamthitta district in the southern Indian state of Kerala, gave unexpected news to Thomas Thomas — the body of his elder brother, Thomas Cherian, had finally been found. Cherian, an army craftsman, was among 102 passengers on board an Indian Air Force aircraft that crashed in the Himalayas in 1968 after encountering severe weather conditions. … For years, the IAF AN-12 aircraft was listed as missing and its fate remained a mystery. Then in 2003, a team of mountaineers found the body of one of the passengers. In the years since then, army search expeditions discovered eight more bodies and in 2019, the wreckage of the plane was recovered from the mountains.” (10/13/24)