Rescuers were searching Saturday for more than 40 people, including a bus carrying Indian tourists, after an overloaded suspension bridge collapsed in southern Nepal, killing two people, police said. Emergency personnel had managed to pull just four people alive from the fast-flowing Trishuli River and recovered the bodies of an Indian and a Nepali, said Gorkha district police officer Krishna Acharya. “There were 47 people on the bridge when it crashed and plunged into the river,” he said.
Trisuli is Nepal’s most popular rafting river with spectacular gorges and rapids and favoured for its easy accessibility from Kathmandu and Pokhara.
Acharya said a busload of Indian tourists en route to Pokhara had stopped on the bridge for sightseeing when a supporting pole snapped due to the excessive load on the ageing iron structure.
“Police personnel are searching for those missing in the river. We don’t have exact numbers of the missing,” he said.
Nepal has hundreds of bridges in the rugged countryside that range from rope or wooden planks to steel and concrete.