Everest conqueror to help recover bodies of climbers

Kolkata: Ujjal Roy, the man who had successfully made it to the Mount Everest in 2013, will now be part of a search operation to recover the bodies of two climbers who had gone missing in an expedition in 2016.

Mr Roy will be the member of the state government team, which will go on the search operation that is expected to kick off soon. The team is expected to bring down the bodies of Goutam Ghosh and Paresh Nath, the climbers who had gone missing in an Everest expedition in May 2016.

“Ujjal Roy, who is presently the officer in charge of Gariahat police station, is slated to lead the four-member team of the state government that will climb up the mountain peak to bring down the bodies of the two climbers once the expedition season reopens in the first week of May,” a top official of the state youth affairs department said.

Mr Roy, who has been an integral part of the Kolkata police force since 1987, is an expert mountaineer and has climbed as many as 15 peaks. Apart from scaling the world’s highest mountain peak, Mr Roy’s claim to fame also lies in his scaling of the “Unnamed Virgin Peak”. Apart from his police job, Mr. Roy has been into mountaineering since 1999.

Sources in the youth affairs department said that the process of selecting the agency for the expedition is on and the detailed proposal has already been forwarded to the finance department.

The team is hopeful that bringing down Paresh Nath’s body will not be a Herculean task as his body was already traced last year near camp 4 and has been kept under proper wrapping. However, the inclement weather prevented the sherpas from bringing it down. “The real challenge is to bring down the body of Mr Ghosh,” the official added.

Some sherpas had claimed that they had spotted Goutam Ghosh’s body at a height of around 8400 metres near the Triangular Face. “We have identified three to four agencies and have asked them to locate the bodies of both and accordingly sent photographs. We hope to complete the selection process of agency by this month,” an official said. Two other mountaineers, Rajiv Bhattacharya and Subhas Pal, who died in the Everest expedition last year were successfully brought down. Mr Nath and Mr Ghosh still remained missing.