MUZAFFARABAD: A woman and her four children died in a remote snowbound hamlet of Neelum valley after their house was struck by an avalanche on Wednesday, police said.

Mumtaz Hussain, Station House Officer (SHO) of Sharda, some 137km northeast of Muzaffarabad, told Dawn by telephone that the house of Gul Zaman was struck by the avalanche in Neelum village of Surgan area between 5pm and 6:30pm, burying alive his wife and four children, identified as Nasreen Bibi, Adnan, Ehtisham, Haleema, and Shah Zain.

Gul Zaman’s another daughter, Tehmina, however, survived as she was at a neighbour’s house at the time the tragedy took place.

Sajid Mir, a local journalist, told Dawn that though Neelum village, where the incident occ­urred, was at a distance of around 25 to 30 kilometres from Sharda tehsil headquarters, heavy snowfall had rendered the road link to it inaccessible for vehicles.

According to him, it took villagers six to eight hours to reach the village from Sharda on foot through the snowcapped track.

He said the area was already blanketed by around three feet high layer of snow which had seen an addition of one foot in the fresh spell of the snowfall.

SHO Hussain said that since the snowfall had also damaged communications link in the high altitude areas of the valley, police came to know about the incident after at least two hours late and that too when some villagers walked towards Sharda but found signals of the valley’s only cellular phone network in the middle of their journey.

He said the avalanche had swept the house far away from where it stood earlier.

“At the moment, the villagers are carrying out rescue operation themselves but there are no chances of survival of anyone,” he said.

He said a 10-member police team had been sent to the village, but it could hardly reach there before 2am. More police personnel and other rescuers will be sent tomorrow morning to recover bodies, he said.

In the late night development, rescuers took out three bodies from the avalanche. They have been identified as Nasreen Bibi, mother; Haleema, daughter; and Shah Zain, son.

Published in Dawn, March 25th, 2021