Intact body of missing father found on melting Pakistan glacier 28 years after he vanished

The family of a missing man whose body was discovered on a melting glacier in Pakistan after 28 years said Thursday its recovery had brought them some relief.

The body of 31-year-old Nasiruddin was spotted by locals near the edge of the shrinking Lady Meadows glacier in the Kohistan region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

His family said he and his brother had fled to the mountains after a dispute in their village in 1997 when he fell into a crevasse. His brother survived.

“Our family left no stone unturned to trace him over the years,” Malik Ubaid, the nephew of the deceased, told AFP over the phone. “Our uncles and cousins visited the glacier several times to see if his body could be retrieved, but they eventually gave up as it wasn’t possible.”

Nasiruddin, who went by one name, was a husband and father of two children.

His well-preserved body, still carrying an identity card, was found on July 31 by a local shepherd and buried on Wednesday.

“The body was intact. The clothes were not even torn,” Omar Khan, a local resident who found the remains, told BBC Urdu.

https://x.com/BBCUrdu/status/1952201878638318066

Hi family expressed gratitude after the discovery.

“Finally, we have got some relief after the recovery of his dead body,” Ubaid said.

Kohistan is a mountainous region where the outer reaches of the Himalayas stretch.

Pakistan is home to more than 13,000 glaciers, more than anywhere else on Earth outside the poles.

Rising global temperatures linked to human-driven climate change, however, are causing the glaciers to rapidly melt.

Bodies exposed by melting glaciers in recent years

As glaciers increasingly melt and recede around the world, there has been an increase in discoveries of the remains of hikers, skiers and other climbers who went missing decades ago.

In July 2024, the preserved body of an American mountaineer was found 22 years after he disappeared while scaling a snowy peak in Peru was found.

The month before that, five frozen bodies were retrieved from Mount Everest— including one that was just skeletal remains — as part of Nepal’s mountain clean-up campaign on Everest and adjoining peaks Lhotse and Nuptse.

In 2023, the remains of a German climber who went missing in 1986 were recovered on a glacier in the Swiss Alps.

In 2017, Italian mountain rescue crews recovered the remains of hikers on a glacier on Mont Blanc’s southern face likely dating from the 1980s or 1990s. Just a few weeks later, the remains of a climber discovered in the Swiss Alps were identified as a British mountaineer who went missing in 1971, local police said Thursday.

That same year, a shrinking glacier in Switzerland revealed the bodies of a frozen couple who went missing in 1942. Police told local media that their bodies were discovered near a ski lift on the glacier by a worker for an adventure resort company.

In 2016, the bodies of a renowned mountain climber and expedition cameraman who were buried in a Himalayan avalanche in 1999 were found partially melting out of a glacier.