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Nepal flash flood: more than 350 killed amid warning of fresh danger from rising lake water – latest updates

Race to get aid into Nepal and Tibet amid warnings another lake could burst

The international community was scrambling to get aid into flood-stricken parts of Nepal and Tibet on Thursday as authorities warned that a lake ⁠formed at the ⁠site ⁠where the deadly torrents occurred ⁠was rising and ⁠at risk of ‌bursting. The catastrophic flash floods, which hit Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, thundering down valleys and obliterating entire villages, killed at least 359 people and left more than 1,300 missing. Efforts to locate those unaccounted for – including hundreds of tourists from India, the US, Britain, Australia and Canada – have been complicated by the destruction of dozens of bridges and almost 25 miles (40km) of roads in the mountainous region, which is popular with trekkers and pilgrims. Rescue teams reported finding bodies hundreds of miles downstream from the disaster zone in the Chitwan district of Nepal, near the Tibetan border. Dozens of injured people were transported to Kathmandu for advanced medical care and more than 100 people were rescued by Nepali army personnel in helicopters. Videos from Wednesday’s disaster showed a massive wall of water crashing down on the border as people tried to flee, even though the power, volume and speed of the floods gave little time for escape. Trucks were overturned and houses, roads ⁠and power plants swept away in Nepal, while officials in Tibet said they feared “major casualties” after a mudslide hit a border crossing. Tom Fletcher, the UN’s humanitarian chief, described the flood as “horrifying”. He said emergency teams had been mobilised and an initial $2m (£1.5m) of disaster funds allocated to cover emergency medical care, shelter and water. Nepal’s disaster authority warned of continuing danger on Thursday, appealing to residents and rescuers to stay away from a swelling lake that had formed at the flood site. The Chinese authorities warned a barrier lake at the confluence of the Tsogyal and Purupqiangzangbu rivers was overflowing and could burst. Girilal Budhathoki, 36, who lives in the Rasuwa district of Nepal’s Bagmati province, said the flood waters had swept away his wife and four children while he was away from the family home. “A huge surge of water came,” he said. “Everything turned completely black, and I couldn’t understand what was happening. Suddenly, something heavy crushed me and I fell down.” Budhathoki realised what had happened only when he returned to the place where his house had stood. “I searched desperately for my wife and children, but I couldn’t find them,” he said. “They didn’t make it out. My wife was swept away too. I am all alone now.” Kamal Kharel, who works at a hydropower plant in Chilime, also in Rasuwa district, was in the office when the floods hit. “The whole place shook as if there had been a huge earthquake,” he said. “But when I went outside, I saw everything a storm and raging water.” Kharel and some of his colleagues managed to climb a hill, where they stayed until they were rescued by the army on Thursday morning. “I had never seen waves crashing that high,” he said. “You only see waves like that in the sea.” People from the hard-hit districts of Nuwakot and Dhading in Bagmati province were seen gathering outside a Nepali army training centre – the base for helicopter rescue operations – seeking information about missing family members. Police were recording the names of the missing outside the barracks gate. Mobile phone torches were their only source of light as the area remained without electricity because of damaged hydroelectric infrastructure. The village of Soley, in Nuwakot, which had about 25 homes, was almost wiped out, according to Nirajan Paudyal, a Kathmandu-based journalist whose parents and other relatives live there. Desperate for information, he travelled to the area on Thursday for news of his family. “There is no update till now,” he said. “I fear there won’t be any update.” More than 500 foreigners were among 826 people missing in Nepal, police and tourism ⁠officials said. Among those unaccounted for were 177 from India, 90 from the US, 34 from Australia, 33 from Britain and 25 from Canada. Chinese state media said at least 558 were missing on the Tibet side of the border, of whom at least 260 were foreign nationals. Police in Nepal said 359 ⁠bodies had been recovered by Thursday afternoon local time, while Chinese state media reported three dead on the Tibet side of the border. Many of the victims were on a pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar, a high-altitude site in ‌Tibet revered by Hindus and Buddhists among others. Early reports from Nepali officials suggested an earthquake could have caused the lower part of a glacier to collapse and trigger ‌the floods. But the US Geological Survey later said what was initially reported ‌as a 4.4-magnitude earthquake was a seismic shock generated by glacial rock and ice collapsing, and the flow of debris. “No earthquake had occurred,” it said. Srijana Gurung, the acting Nepal director for the international NGO Plan International, said communities across the Himalayan country were facing “climate shock after shock” with hardly any time to recover. “Floods and landslides have always happened in Nepal but the climate crisis is making them far more frequent and intense,” she said. “The priority now must be reaching those affected, supporting families searching for loved ones and ensuring vulnerable communities have the assistance they need.” Gurung said children and families who had lost their homes and livelihoods would be in urgent need of medical help, food, shelter and hygiene kits, adding: “There is also a risk of waterborne disease as access to clean water and sanitation is likely to have been damaged.” Scant information has emerged from the Chinese authorities about the scale of the destruction caused by the flooding on the border between Nepal and Tibet. Tibet is the most tightly controlled part of China even under normal circumstances. Foreign journalists cannot visit the region unless they are part of a government-controlled tour and the authorities have cracked down harshly on calls for greater autonomy from the Tibetan people. Tibetans have almost no contact with the international media because of fears of retribution. Only brief, state-controlled media reports about the floods have been allowed to circulate in China and the authorities have confirmed only three deaths, compared with the more than 300 fatalities confirmed by the Nepali authorities. Chinese reports have focused on the rescue efforts rather than the scale of the destruction. Maya Wang, the deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said on X: “The floods raise questions about whether Chinese authorities could’ve done more to reduce disaster risks, [especially] given long-standing concerns from Tibetan diaspora groups & experts about rapid, state-led development in areas where Tibetans have little say.” She called on Beijing to “allow Tibetans access to information and international researchers and journalists unfettered access to the region, and conduct a rigorous investigation into the disaster”.

Ratko Mladić, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, dies aged 84

Ratko Mladić, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for genocide committed during the Bosnian war, has died in prison in The Hague. Mladić, 84, had been one of the main architects of the policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. He was convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Muslims in the UN-designated “safe area” Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war. Mladić, who was nicknamed the “Butcher of Bosnia”, had been in ill health after having a series of strokes. A UN international tribunal confirmed Mladić’s death, saying he had died in hospital in The Hague earlier in the day. “Mladić passed away today while hospitalised in The Hague,” the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals said in a statement, adding that judge Graciela Gatti Santana had ordered “a full inquiry into the circumstances” of his death. Described by the former UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein as “the epitome of evil” after his conviction, Mladić was one of the most notorious figures of the war that killed more than 100,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless. He commanded his troops to “scorch the brains” of Bosnian Muslim people and had boasted of being a “Serbian god”. The news of Mladić’s death was first broken on Serbian state television after his son, Darko, had spoken earlier about his father’s declining health. Mladić was sentenced by a UN tribunal to life imprisonment in 2017 over genocide and war crimes committed during Bosnia’s 1990s war. He was arrested in Serbia in 2011 after 16 years on the run. The slaughter in Srebrenica was the culmination of a brutal war that had lasted more than three ⁠years, during which Mladić oversaw the siege of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, which was pounded daily by artillery, tank and sniper fire, killing 10,000 people. The goal of the Serbian leadership, which Mladić was tasked with implementing – as determined ⁠by the UN’s international criminal tribunal for ⁠the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) – was the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian land for the creation of a greater Serbia. The tribunal found that Mladić, together with the late Serbian president Slobodan Milošević and the Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan. “I do not recognise this court,” Mladić said at an ⁠ICTY hearing on his case in 2014. When he was sentenced, he shouted: “This is all lies, you are all liars!” The Serbian campaign culminated in the horror of Srebrenica when, after the withdrawal of Dutch UN peacekeeping forces, thousands of Bosnian men and boys were rounded up, killed and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves. Mladić had the siege filmed to show him praising his “lads” and haranguing the UN peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands. “We give this town to the Serb people as a gift,” Mladić said to the camera, claiming the victory as revenge against Muslim Turks, who had once held the area as part ‌of the Ottoman empire. The next day, Mladić’s forces were filmed handing out sweets to children, promising their safe passage. Meanwhile, thousands of men and boys were being readied for slaughter. When Nato tried in 1995 to rein in his forces with the threat of limited airstrikes, his troops seized UN peacekeepers as human shields, chaining them to likely targets. The son of a second world war partisan fighter killed in 1945, Mladić was an officer in the communist Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) when Yugoslavia’s disintegration began in 1991. When Bosnian Serbs rose in 1992 against Bosnia’s Muslim-led secession, Mladić was chosen to command the new Bosnian Serb army that swiftly overran 70% of the country. Dozens of towns were besieged with heavy weapons that once belonged to the JNA and villages were burned down, as 22,000 troops with the UN Protection Force stood by, more or less helplessly, under orders not to take sides. A combination of western pressure, Nato strikes and covert US arms and training for Croats and ⁠Muslims gradually turned the tide against Mladić’s army. After the war, Mladić went into hiding, with the reformists ruling post-conflict Serbia not daring to move against a man who was a hero to a core of nationalist Serbs. Mladić continued to insist he was “a simple man” chosen to protect his people. When he was finally arrested in 2011, he put up no resistance. He had a heart attack in 2013 and seemed older than his years. By his own account, he felt like a frail old man. This month, a UN doctor said Mladić’s death “may occur at any time”, possibly within weeks, but his application for release was again rejected. Munira Subašić, from the Mothers of Srebrenica group, said she deplored that Mladić’s crimes were still being denied by many Bosnian Serbs. “Today, a major war criminal died, the criminal of the Balkans,” Subašić said. But while 31 years later mothers of victims were “still carrying the pain in our souls … we are still listening to denials, we are still listening to how Ratko Mladić was a hero for the Serbs”. Elizabeth Evenson, the international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The death of Ratko Mladić, the former Bosnian Serb army commander found guilty of genocide, including the massacre of up to 8,000 Bosnian men and boys after the fall of Srebrenica, Bosnia, in July 1995, is a reminder of the ongoing need for justice, truth, and reparations in the western Balkans. “Full accountability for such terrible crimes, in Bosnia and elsewhere, demands commitment by governments to justice, even decades after the events themselves.”

How the deadly Nepal and Tibet flash flood unfolded – a visual guide

At 8.37am on Wednesday, an enormous section ⁠of a glacier in the Himalayas sheared free and crashed on to the valley floor in Nepal’s Langtang national park, about 35 miles (60km) north of the capital, Kathmandu, near the mountainous Nepal-Tibet border. Such was the force of the event, it was initially reported as an earthquake of magnitude 4.4. The US Geological Survey later determined the tremor was caused by glacial rock and ice collapsing, registering a magnitude of 5.2. The collapse triggered a huge release of water, mud, rock and ice that thundered down valleys and swept down the Lhende, Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers. The high-speed flash floods careered towards northern Nepalese towns, including areas popular with mountaineering tourists and pilgrims. Horrifying videos from the Gyirong border post, which connects Nepal and Tibet, showed people running for their lives as the wall of debris obliterated buildings and swept away lines of buses. In Nepal, houses and roads ⁠were washed away in seconds. “It was a huge gush of mud coming straight towards us,” said Keshav Prasad Baral, 68, a survivor who was being treated at a small hospital. “As it got closer, it kept rising higher and higher. When I saw it enter our home, I tried to grab my wife’s hand and take ⁠her to the terrace. But she was swept away by the mud. Four or five hours later, a helicopter came to rescue me. My wife is still somewhere beneath the mud. She’s gone.” Another survivor described being saved by clinging to a mango tree as he watched the house where he had been ⁠working disappear. In a stark illustration of the deluge’s deadly power, a bridge crossing the Trishuli River was shown in a video being washed away in a tsunami-like flood. Multi-level homes were quickly submerged as the torrent gouged through the riverside town. Bibek Kumal, a Nepali labourer, had been working in Bidur when others sounded the alarm. “I started running. Then a wall of water came thundering down as if it was an earthquake,” ⁠Kumal said from his bed at Kathmandu’s national trauma centre. The torrent had swept him downstream amid mud and debris but “luckily I was stuck up in a mango tree”, he ‌said. “Had there been no mango tree, I would ‌have been washed away to death.” At a location just north of Kumal’s lucky escape in Bidur, a video shows an immense flood swallowing a river valley as it surges towards Betrawati Bazaar, an important historical and pilgrimage town. Mud and water moving at such high speeds forms a lethal combination “like liquid concrete” that cannot be outrun, said Hatim Sharif, a hydrologist at the University of Texas, San Antonio. Satellite imagery taken above Kolpurtar shows how the mud, water and debris swallowed up land on either side of the river. Rescue operations were difficult on Wednesday because of damage to infrastructure and higher than normal river levels. Helicopters could not land in Nepal’s affected areas of Syapru Besi and Timure, in the Rasuwa region, which has a population of about 50,000. Rescuers waded through mud and sludge looking for survivors after flood waters buried the lower floors of multi-storey buildings. “There is devastation everywhere we look,” Tula Bahadur BK, a health worker in Rasuwa, told Reuters. “The settlements next to the river have been completely swept away. Five of my own relatives are missing.” Dave Petley, an earth scientist with Nottingham Trent University, described the scale of the event as close to “apocalyptic”. The huge volume of water was possibly a combination of ice that converted to water as a result of the initial collapse and river water. But until the exact cause of the disaster could be confirmed by scientists, that was just speculation, he noted in the science outlet Eos. Footage filmed on Thursday showed extensive damage to buildings in Nuwakot district, and people wading through knee-high mud. The Himalayan mountain range spans several countries in south Asia and has many of the world’s highest peaks and remaining glaciers. The steep slopes and the lush valleys below are especially vulnerable to flooding and landslides, and extreme weather events such as intense monsoons and melting glaciers have become more common because of warming due to human-caused climate change. Researchers in Kathmandu found earlier this year that glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya region were melting faster, with ice loss rates doubling since 2000. With Reuters and Associated Press

Officials urge calm after malaria outbreak kills two staff at Frankfurt airport

German health officials are seeking to reassure the public after two workers at the country’s biggest airport died of malaria. Mosquito traps have been set up at Frankfurt airport and a mosquito monitoring process is under way. A detailed investigation is being conducted to clarify how the workers contracted the disease. Since last month, six people are known to have caught malaria tropica – the most dangerous form of the disease – in connection with their work at the airport. Of the two that have died, one began getting sick at the start of July and the other in mid-August. The four other people who were infected have been treated in hospital and are now out of danger, according to Frankfurt’s public health department. Letters have been sent to all airport workers to raise awareness about symptoms and urge vigilance. Doctors are being asked to watch out for patients with unexplained fever who work in and around the airport. In a statement on its website, the health department acknowledged the existence of “airport malaria”, where mosquitoes from malaria-endemic areas are transported in flight cabins or in baggage holds. It said that because this was “a very rare occurrence”, malaria could easily be overlooked and diagnosis delayed, increasing the chance of death. It said human-to-human transmission was not possible. The Robert Koch Institute, which is responsible for disease control and prevention in Germany, believes the Frankfurt infection was transmitted by an Anopheles stephensi mosquito imported by plane. A spokesperson for Fraport, which operates the airport, confirmed that mosquito traps had been set up in and around the site and that mosquitoes had been caught. These are being examined in a tropical medicine laboratory in Antwerp, Belgium. Peter Tinnemann, the head of Frankfurt’s health department, told the broadcaster Hessische Rundfunk: “The mosquito is probably already dead.” He said higher temperatures in Germany increased the likelihood of mosquitoes surviving for extended periods but the risk to the population of Frankfurt was low. “Not everyone should assume that just because they have a headache, fever and nonspecific symptoms they are now infected with malaria because of the case at the airport,” he added. But he said the rise in malaria cases made it necessary to check whether existing measures, including the disinfection of aircraft and removing breeding grounds for mosquitoes, were being correctly followed. A study that set out to record all cases of airport and baggage malaria in Europe from 1969 to 2024 found 145 instances, nine of them in Germany. The Robert Koch Institute said Germany’s last outbreak of airport malaria was also at Frankfurt, in 2023, when a single documented infection was successfully treated. About 90% of all malaria cases occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Countries from this region with direct flight connections to Frankfurt include Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania, all of which have a high to widespread malaria risk. Namibia and South Africa also have direct flights but are considered to be moderate to low risk.

‘Lots of my friends are missing’: fears and prayers as Australia’s Nepali diaspora desperately seek answers after flood

When Suman Shrestha opened his phone at work and saw vision of a thick, muddy wall of flood water smashing into towns in his country of birth, he almost did not believe what he was seeing. “It was awful – I called my family to see if this was really happening and to see if the news reports were right,” says Shrestha, who moved to Australia from Kathmandu in 2017. It wasn’t long until the truth hit home. Like many of the 210,000 people who were born in Nepal but now call Australia home, Shrestha has spent the last 24 hours scrambling to find out if his loved ones are safe. “I can see that lots of my friends are missing,” says Shrestha, who now lives in Gosford. “We can’t get in contact with them because the communications have been cut off in that area.” Nearly 1,500 people are missing and at least 165 have been killed in Nepal and Tibet by the flood, which was caused by an avalanche of ice and rock on Wednesday. At least 34 Australians have been reported missing in the area, including a child as young as 11. Shrestha fears two friends who he grew up with in Nepal may now be dead. They were working as tour guides and were leading a group of tourists on a trek in the area devastated by the flood water. “It’s hard,” Shrestha says. “One of them is my close friend’s brother. The other lived near my home in Nepal … I know them well. “Their families know that they have been trekking in this area and now they cannot contact them,” he says. “They were in contact until 9am on Wednesday, Nepal time, now they can’t reach them.” Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email Shrestha says their families in Nepal are constantly trying to contact the government for help, but there is little they can do. “It’s hard for the government, as there is no proper way to reach them and no proper search can be done at the moment,” Shrestha says. In Sydney, Sujan Tamang is growing increasingly worried about his uncle and aunt. He has not spoken to them since Wednesday. His sister, who works at a hydropower plant in Nepal, had to run from the flood water to safety. He says some of her colleagues are now dead. When he first watched the footage from Nepal, Tamang could identify the buildings being swept away as if made of straw. “When I saw that video, it was a very bad feeling,” said Tamang. “That house, that place, I know every place and I know every person. I have entered their houses, we have eaten together, slept together, we were like family.” Vasan Srinivasan is also scrambling for answers. The chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation Australia is searching for 15 Australians who travelled to Nepal on a pilgrimage organised by the Himalayan Glacier tour group. All but one are Sydney-based members of his religious group, Australia Bharatha Brahmin Samaj. “I’ve been very busy using all my contacts, including Nepali community leaders here in Australia,” says Srinivasan, who has also called on Australian ministers for help. “I am concerned about their wellbeing … Hopefully, God can give me the privilege to get them back to Sydney.” Chiran Tiwari, the president of the Nepalese Australian Welfare Society, says it has been a chaotic and stressful time for members. “They are trying to call whoever is in the nearest area that they are able to contact,” Tiwari says. “It is a very big disaster.” As the Nepali community waits for the full scale of the disaster to become clear, more than 100 people gathered for a special prayer service at a Buddhist temple in Melbourne’s north-western suburbs. The service’s host, the Australian Nepalese Multicultural Centre, said the community gathered “in prayer for those who have lost their lives, those who remain missing, the injured and all families affected by this disaster”. Others who feel helpless have turned their attention to fundraising, including for the Nepali government’s disaster relief fund. “At the moment, we are in the initial phase of our community campaign here in Victoria, trying to raise awareness and mobilise support for those affected by the disaster in Nepal,” said Prem Raj Upreti, the president of the Nepalese Association of Victoria. On Thursday afternoon, Nepal’s T20 cricket team paused for a moment of silence before playing at Darwin’s Gardens Oval. In a statement, the Northern Territory’s minister for multicultural affairs, Jinson Charls, said it was providing support to the players and team officials. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with our local Nepalese and Tibetan communities and will provide all support as necessary,” Charls said.

What caused the catastrophic flood in Nepal and Tibet – and how does a glacier collapse?

Hundreds of people have died in catastrophic flash floods in Nepal. Here’s what we know so far about what caused the disaster. What happened and when? On Wednesday morning local time, a landslide of ice and rock resulted in a torrent of mud, water and debris bursting the banks of the Trishuli river, also known as the Bhotekoshi, which runs between China and Nepal. Homes, roads, bridges and power plants were swept away. Experts at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development said water levels on the Trishuli river rose by as much as nine metres in half an hour. The Lhende Khola river, a tributary of the Trishuli, was most affected, they said. What caused the flooding in Nepal? Nepal’s foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, told the country’s parliament on Wednesday that initial reports suggested the floods could have been caused by an earthquake in the ⁠area that triggered a landslide. However, the US Geological Survey (USGS) subsequently said that a glacial collapse was responsible for the seismic event and for the flooding itself. The USGS noted that the glacial collapse had registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event, occurring near the border between Nepal and China at 8.37am local time on Wednesday. According to Daniel Shugar, a geomorphologist and associate professor at the University of Calgary in Canada, initial satellite analysis showed a 0.2 sq km chunk of ice had “collapsed about 1.2km vertically”. “What I can see in … satellite imagery from Planet Labs, the lower part of a glacier broke off at about 5,200 metres and crashed on to the valley floor about 1,200 metres below,” he said. The imagery seemed to show that a large ‌amount of snow had melted in the 24 hours prior to the disaster, he said. “Some of the glaciers in the valley were covered in snow yesterday and today they are mostly bare ice. So in other words (and I haven’t seen any weather station data yet), it was probably warm.” Shugar said construction could also be a factor. Prof Andrew Mackintosh, a glaciologist at Monash University in Melbourne, said it was unclear whether the collapse was isolated to the glacier, or was the “whole mountainside collapsing that included part of the glacier”. “When a glacier of that scale collapses, it generates a lot of water, and then there’s a cascading sequence of events … where the water and the sediment combine and bulks up and creates the flood.” How often do glaciers collapse – and is the climate crisis a factor? “These sorts of large glacier collapses are really shocking,” Mackintosh said. “It’s hard as a glaciologist not be alarmed by these events that seem different to what we’ve observed previously.” However, he said there had been “so few of these documented that we’re not really able to make very clear statements about the specific relationship between glacier collapse and climate change yet”. Scientists do, however, “have very high confidence in the relationship between glacier retreat and climate change”. “We also know that mountain permafrost is degrading under a warming climate,” Mackintosh added. He described permafrost, ground that is frozen year round, as being akin to a “glue that holds the rock and sometimes adjacent glaciers … together on very steep slopes”. The Himalayas – spanning Nepal, India, China, Bhutan and Pakistan – are warming twice as fast as the global average, putting the region at increased risk of avalanches, landslides and floods. The UN said in 2023 that Nepal’s mountains had lost close to one-third of their ice in just over 30 years due to global heating. An assessment published that year found that the Hindu Kush Himalayan glaciers had disappeared 65% faster between 2011 and 2020 than in the previous decade. In 2021, a Himalayan glacier broke off and caused flash flooding in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, leaving 200 people dead or missing. Subsequent research suggested that a 27m-cubic-metre avalanche of rock and glacier ice had transformed into “an extraordinarily large and mobile debris flow”. Though not thought to be a cause of the August 2026 event, mountain areas are also at risk of “glacial lake outburst floods”. Glacial lakes form behind natural dams as a result of glacier melt, and can cause catastrophic outburst floods if their natural dam walls are breached. Adrian McCallum, a glaciologist, polar engineer and associate professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, said: “With a warming climate, glaciers recede, ice becomes water, that water gets trapped.” More than 12,000 deaths have already been attributed to such floods globally. According to the UN, Nepal has more than 2,000 glacial lakes, of which 21 are considered potentially dangerous. With Reuters and Associated Press

Search on for at least 33 Britons missing after flash floods in Nepal and Tibet

Rescue teams in Nepal are searching for at least 33 British nationals who are among those missing after flash floods ravaged its border with Tibet, killing at least 353 people. Nearly 1,400 people are missing, most of them tourists, authorities have said, after a glacier collapse triggered floods that roared down valleys and razed entire villages. The tour company Kailash Journeys confirmed it had not been able to account for seven UK nationals – five women and two men aged between 18 and 55 – travelling with it. Another tour operator, the Trekkers’ Society, said among the British citizens who had been completing one of its tours to the sacred Hindu site of Mount Kailash were four males aged 14, 50, 50 and 54 and five women aged 40, 46, 50, 50 and 53. The tour operator Alpine Eco Trek said a 13-year-old girl was among the missing British nationals and two Irish citizens were also missing. They were on a nine-day tour to Mount Kailash and crossing into Tibet from Nepal when they became trapped at the border as the flash floods struck. Other missing British nationals with Alpine Eco Trek are three men aged 65, 64 and 52 and seven women aged 44, 47, 51, 60, 63, 63 and 65, according to travel logs. The tour company Himalayan Glacier US told the BBC it had lost contact with a group of 47 guests, including two British citizens, who were en route to Mount Kailash. Fishtail Tours, a Nepali travel agency, said one British person was missing. Andy Burnham has pledged an initial £5m in UK government support and offered to send emergency responders and rescue support to assist Nepal’s disaster response efforts. Speaking to journalists during a visit to south Wales, he said: “It’s a devastating picture that is emerging from what has happened in Nepal. Scenes that we’ve never seen the like before, I don’t think, certainly the scale of the devastation. “So there is immediate action being taken. We are deploying consular support staff to the region so that British nationals will be able to access support 24/7. Obviously there are a number of British nationals who currently are thought to be missing and we’ll be providing all the support we can to their families in what is a very distressing and devastating situation.” In a statement, he added: “In the past, Nepal has been there for Britain in our hour of need, and we will be there for Nepal in its hour of need right now.” The president of the Nepal Centre for Disaster Management, Bishal Nath Upreti, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the flash floods were like a “tsunami from the sky”. He said: “It’s a huge debris, and in fact, after the 2015 earthquake, this is one of the largest disasters that we have [had] in Nepal.” He added: “It was such a huge amount of water. You can imagine it is 20m cubic metres excess water on the river … Villages and villages along the almost 40 to 50 kilometres were completely wiped out.” The Nepal tourism board said on Wednesday that 33 UK citizens were among the foreign nationals unaccounted for. At least three people had died in Tibet, according to China’s state broadcaster CCTV, while the Xinhua news agency said 558 people were unaccounted for in the region. Rescuers are racing to locate people missing in the mountainous Rasuwa region, which borders China’s autonomous region of Tibet and is popular with trekkers and pilgrims. Pramod Poudel, from Uckfield, East Sussex, told the BBC that his wife, parents, brother and uncle had been caught in flash flooding. He said he would fly to Nepal on Thursday night to try to make contact with them. Poudel said: “I guess there is no power so they can’t charge their phones – to be honest, it’s a very hard and difficult time at the moment.” In an emotional interview, he said: “I have seen pictures of where my home town used to be … and there is nothing there now.” The UK government minister Pat McFadden told Times Radio the picture was “not completely clear yet”, with “many, many more” people understood to be missing than those reported by the Nepalese authorities, and no clear figures from China yet. He said: “In terms of missing Britons, my colleague the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, has posted on social media phone numbers that people can call for further information. “But it’s a fast-moving picture. We don’t have a full picture yet of the numbers missing.” The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it was “deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation caused by the floods in Nepal”. It added: “British nationals in Nepal should follow local authority advice and exercise caution while travelling. For consular assistance call (+44) (0)207 008 5000 or (+977) (0)14237100.”