A soldier rescued nearly a week after he was buried by a deadly avalanche on the world’s highest battleground was yesterday being treated in Delhi in “extremely critical” condition, the army said.
Hanamanthappa Koppad spent six days trapped after a massive block of ice fell onto his army post 19,600ft high in the Himalayas, killing nine of his colleagues.
His rescue late Monday came days after India said there was little hope of survivors from the disaster on the Siachen glacier in Jammu and Kashmir.
General D S Hooda, who heads the Indian Army’s northern command, said the man’s survival under nearly 25ft of snow in temperatures of minus 45 degrees Celsius was a “miracle”.
“It was not a typical soft snow avalanche. It was like a wall of rock-hard ice,” he said, describing how army rescuers used sniffer dogs and specialist radar to detect the buried soldiers before cutting them free.
“The effort went on day and night, except during two nights when blizzards hit the area.
“In the end, the whole effort paid off as a miracle when a survivor was pulled out.”
The soldier, who was found conscious but severely hypothermic and in shock, was airlifted to a military hospital in Delhi yesterday.
A government statement said he was now comatose and in an “extremely critical” condition and had been placed on a ventilator.
“We are all very, very happy,” Koppad’s father told reporters in comments broadcast on television.
“God has been very kind to us. His mother had been crying, I was also crying,” he said, without giving his name.
“We don’t have money to go and visit him. If the government can help us a little, we can go to meet him.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the soldier in hospital shortly after his arrival in Delhi.
“We are all hoping and praying for the best,” Modi tweeted.
“No words are enough to describe the endurance and indomitable spirit of Lance Naik Hanumanthappa. He is an outstanding soldier,” Modi said.
Hooda said the bodies of the other nine soldiers had now been retrieved, declaring the rescue mission over.
Special battery-operated snow-cutters had to be flown in using helicopters, which at that altitude can only carry up to 50kg in weight, he said.
An estimated 8,000 soldiers have died on the glacier since 1984, almost all of them from avalanches, landslides, frostbite, altitude sickness or heart failure rather than combat.
In 2012, 140 Pakistani soldiers were killed at the high-altitude Gayari base in one of the worst disasters on the glacier.
Each side is estimated to deploy around 3,000 troops on the glacier, where winter temperatures plummet to minus 70 degrees Celsius, with blizzards gusting at speeds of 160km per hour.

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