46 years later, Indian diplomatic bag discovered on Mt Blanc

Grenoble (

), Aug 29: A bag of Indian diplomatic mail is set to be delivered more than 46 years late after it was found on Mont Blanc in the French

, close to where an

plane crashed in Jan 1966. The jute bag, stamped "

mail" and "Ministry of External Affairs", was recovered by mountain rescue worker Arnaud Christmann and his neighbour Jules Berger on Aug 21.

"Some tourists came and told us they had seen something shining on the Bossons glacier," so he and his neighbour decided to go have a look, Christmann told AFP on Wednesday. "We found pieces of the cabin, a shoe, cables - it's a real dump up there!" The two men also came across a plane wheel and, 20 metres further on, the diplomatic bag that was "sitting as if someone had just placed it there." "We were hoping for diamonds or at least a few gold ingots. Instead, we got some soaking wet mail and Indian newspapers," Christmann quipped.

"It's not the sort of thing you find very often in the mountains -- the mail's going to arrive 46 years late." The Kangchenjunga, a Boeing 707 flying from Mumbai to New York, crashed on the southwest face of Mont Blanc, western Europe's highest mountain, on Jan 24, 1966, as it descended towards a scheduled stopover in Geneva, Switzerland. All 117 people on board died. The diplomatic bag was handed over to police in the town of Chamonix at the base of the mountain.

The Indian embassy in Paris said on Wednesday that it had not been informed of the discovery but that officials would be looking into it with a view to recovering the bag. In Sept 2008, well-known climber Daniel Roche discovered Indian newspapers dated Jan 23, 1966 in the same area. Roche also came across part of an engine from the Malabar Princess, another Air India plane which had crashed in a virtually identical location in 1950.

AFP