Nepal seeks help in identifying bodies recovered from Mt Everest

Nepal sought help in identifying the bodies of four mountaineers that were recovered from Mount Everest, the world's highest peak, during this expedition season.

The New York Times quoted Mira Acharya, the director of Nepal's department of tourism, as saying on Friday that her office was preparing to review autopsy reports for the climbers, who were brought down from the world's highest mountain as part of a spring trash cleanup.

Acharya said that officials plan to work with embassies in Kathmandu to get in contact with relatives of the deceased climbers. "If family members do not approach us about the bodies, we will have to cremate them," she added.

The corpses were recovered from different parts of the mountain, including the area close to the summit.

Kul Bahadur Gurung, the general secretary of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, which was involved in retrieving the bodies, said some of them were unrecognisable and so the government along with the police is facing difficulty in sending the bodies back to their home countries.

"Avalanches broke their bodies," he said, adding that they were all believed to be foreigners and that it was unclear how long they had been on the mountain.

More than 300 people have died on the 8,848-metre (29,029-feet) high mountain since expeditions to reach the top started in the 1920s.

At least 20 climbers including few Indians died during the expedition to in the last few days. According to the reports, most of the deaths were due to weakness, exhaustion, and delays on the crowded route to the 8,848-meter summit.

In the last few seasons, climbers say that even more bodies are emerging from the ice. It is believed to be a grim result of global warming, which is rapidly melting the mountain's glaciers and exposing corpses and bones of people who died decades ago.

As part of this spring's cleanup effort, volunteers have also collected more than 20,000 pounds of trash, including plastic bottles, ropes, tents, and food tins.