By Gopal Sharma
KATHMANDU, Sept 7 (Reuters) – Grief-stricken Nepalis entered the traditional Hindu last day of mourning on Monday for the hundreds who died in the catastrophic flood along the country’s border with China even as the government kept search operations going after four miracle rescues in recent days.
Government offices in the Hindu majority nation of 30 million people and at missions abroad would fly the national flag at half-mast to mark the 13th day after death, the home ministry said in a statement. The day is considered the final day of mourning by the faithful, who commemorate it with rituals and food offerings.
A huge wall of mud and rock, triggered by a glacier breaking off, collapsed into a river on the Himalayan border of Nepal and China’s Tibet on August 26, washing away towns and villages and burying roads and highways under piles of mud and debris.
At least 1,380 people have been killed by the mudslide and more than 5,500 are missing.
In recent days, search teams in Nepal have rescued four people, including a Chinese national who was pulled from a tunnel on Saturday. The others were two hydropower workers rescued from another tunnel on Friday and a Nepali woman pulled out from her buried house on Saturday.
Rescue operations in Nepal were focused on hydropower stations in the region, army spokesperson Raja Ram Basnet said, where authorities believe there might still be survivors.
Chinese officials said on Sunday that workers had recovered 12 more bodies as the search continued for hundreds still missing in Tibet.
NO CEREMONIES AMID ONGOING SEARCH
With search teams still looking for survivors, the government has not planned any wider events for the final day of mourning.
“There are no government programmes organised as the rescue and search operation is still going on in the flood-hit areas,” Phanindra Paudel of the National Emergency Operation Centre (NEOC) told Reuters.
President Ram Chandra Paudel, the ceremonial head of state, was touring flood-hit areas on Monday and would survey damage caused by the disaster, his aide said.
Security personnel at the district jail in Nuwakot, one of the two worst affected districts, saved 923 prisoners by shifting them to a building in a higher location before flood waters entered their low-lying building, Prime Minister Balendra Shah said in a social media post.
Authorities also captured 50 prisoners who had broken the prison wall and gates as flooding began, and had fled barely 100 metres, Shah said.
(Reporting by Gopal Sharma in Kathmandu, writing by Shilpa Jamkhandikar; Editing by YP Rajesh and Saad Sayeed)
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