KATHMANDU: An elite Nepalese mountaineer responsible for setting up climbing routes on Mount Everest plunged to his death over the weekend, the first loss of the summit season, an official said yesterday.
Mingmar Sherpa, was a member of a team known as the “icefall doctors” who maintain the routes up Everest, setting up ropes and ladders which are used by hundreds of commercial climbers on the world’s highest mountain.
He was returning to the team’s campsite on Sunday when he slipped and fell to his death in a crevasse, said Gyanendra Kumar Shrestha of the Nepal Tourism Board.
5 dead, 53 hurt in Thai bus cliff plunge
BANGKOK: Five people died, including a seven-month-old baby and a Belgian woman, and 53 were injured when a Thai tour bus plummeted off a hillside in northern Thailand after its brakes failed, police said.
Passengers said the coach had swerved several times on winding mountain roads, before it ploughed through a fence and down a steep ravine, according to local police in Phitsanulok province 380 kilometres from Bangkok.
“The bus had problems with its brakes and was speeding before it crashed over the cliff,” district police captain Sane Promrut said.Bali upholds Briton’s death sentence
Denpasar: An Indonesian court yesterday upheld the death sentence handed down to a 56-year-old British grandmother found guilty of trafficking cocaine into the resort island of Bali.
A spokesman said the Bali High Court, sitting in the island’s capital Denpasar, had confirmed the death sentence given to Lindsay Sandiford in January, which had been a shock verdict after prosecutors recommended 15 years imprisonment.
Indonesian police say she was at the centre of a drugs importing ring involving three other Britons after a drugs haul worth $2.4m was found in her suitcase as she arrived on a flight from Bangkok last May.
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