Children stuck in Pakistan cable car; military launches rescue operation

“The military rescue team is now trying to use other options including a sling operation or rope ladder to save them,” he said. “This is a highly risky operation but the military rescue troops are carrying it carefully.”

A second official said a military rescuer provided food, water and emergency medicine to the children in the cable car.

A photograph shared by Agence-France Presse news agency shared an image of an army soldier moving down from a helicopter. The medicine, the official said, was intended to stabilize the children before their rescue.

The group was traveling across the ravineTuesday morning in Battagram, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, when the incident took place.

The cable car is hanging over a ravine by a single cable after the other snapped, Shariq Riaz Khattak, a rescue official on the scene told Reuters, adding that the rescue efforts were complicated by gusts of wind. Khattak also said one of the passengers had fainted.

The children were using the transport, which some officials called a chair lift, to get to school in a mountainous area about 124 miles north of Islamabad, the agency reported.

Rescue teams are trying to spread nets under the cable car, an official from the area, Jawad Hussain, told Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper. He said that locals organized and used the privately-owned cable car due to the lack of roads and bridges in the area.

The Pakistani military said special forces were also arriving at the site to rescue those trapped.

Pakistan’s caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar described the incident as “really alarming.” He posted that he had ordered authorities “to urgently ensure safe rescue and evacuation of the 8 people stuck in the chairlift,” adding that he had ordered safety inspections of all chair lifts.

Kakar was appointed caretaker prime minister after the country’s parliament was dissolved earlier this month.

A 20-year-old who is on the lift identified only as Gulfaraz told local outlet Geo News that he and other passengers have been stuck for more than six hours. He said that a 16-year-old passenger, who suffers from a heart condition, was unconscious for hours. “We don’t even have drinking water in the chairlift,” he said.

The students are between 10 to 16 years old, he said.

“The first cable broke down after the chairlift travelled a mile,” he said, adding that the passengers have been waiting for help since early morning and that there was a second cable that snapped.

A school teacher, Zafar Iqbal, told Geo News that 150 children in the area typically use the cable car to travel to school.