17 July 2004	Saturday	28 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425

MANSEHRA, July 16: The bodies of two missing members of a research team of the Pakistan Forest Institute, Peshawar, were found in the mountains of the Kaghan valley on Friday.

They have been identified as Syed Ghulam Mujtaba Shah, a resident of Hyderabad, and Abdul Qadeer, a resident of Jam Shoro. A 58-member team of the institute had gone to Paras in the Kaghan valley on July 12. Later, the group formed teams which left for Shogran, Makra Top and other areas of the valley for research purposes.

In the evening all the teams returned to their base camp, but six people were missing. They included Altaf Ali Shah, resident of Chitral, Taimur Arif and Kaneez Fatima, residents of Attock, Humaira Begum, resident of Bannu, Syed Ghulam Mujtaba Shah, resident of Hyderabad, and Abdul Qadeer, resident of Jam Shoro.

A search was launched to find the missing people. Sardar Mohammad Rafique, PFI director general, had told newsmen on Thursday that four members of the missing team had returned to the base camp while the whereabouts of the remaining two were still unknown.

He had said that they had descended from the mountain top on the Muzzafarabad side. The officials of Pakistan Forest Institute were unnerved on Friday when a missing team member Altaf Ali Shah cited the place from where the two had separated from them.

A few yards away from that point, the bodies of Syed Mujtaba Shah and Abdul Qadeer were spotted lying deep in a ravine. The cause of their death could not be known. When contacted, an official on duty at the Balakot police station told this correspondent that a postmortem of the bodies would be conducted at the THQ hospital in Balakot.