Thomas Thomas received unexpected news from a caller from a police station in the Pathanamthitta region of the southern Indian state of Kerala: his older brother Thomas Cherian’s body had been located.
An Indian Air Force plane carrying 102 people, including Cherian, an army craftsman, crashed in the Himalayas in 1968 after running into bad weather.
While flying over the Rohtang pass, which connects Indian-administered Kashmir with the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, the aircraft vanished from radar.
The IAF AN-12 plane was reported lost for years, and no one knew what had happened to it.
The body of one of the passengers was discovered by a group of mountaineers in 2003.
Eight more remains were found by army search teams in the years that followed, and the plane’s wreckage was salvaged from the mountains in 2019.
When the army uncovered four bodies, including Cherian’s, a few days ago, the 1968 crash made headlines once more.
Mr. Thomas told news Hindi that the family felt as though “the suffocation of 56 years had suddenly evaporated” when the news reached them.
He claims, “I was able to breathe again at last.”
When Cherian vanished, he was only 22 years old and the second of five children. He had taken off for his first field assignment in the Leh region of the Himalayas.
