1968 IAF crash: Closure for India families as four bodies found 56 years after plane crash

It was a phone call that ended a decades-long wait – of 56 years and eight months, to be precise.

The caller, from a police station in Pathanamthitta district in the southern Indian state of Kerala, gave unexpected news to Thomas Thomas – the body of his elder brother, Thomas Cherian, had finally been found.

Cherian, an army craftsman, was among 102 passengers on board an Indian Air Force aircraft that crashed in the Himalayas in 1968 after encountering severe weather conditions.

The plane went off the radar while it was flying over the Rohtang pass, which links the northern state of Himachal Pradesh to Indian-administered Kashmir.

For years, the IAF AN-12 aircraft was listed as missing and its fate remained a mystery.

Then in 2003, a team of mountaineers found the body of one of the passengers.

In the years since then, army search expeditions discovered eight more bodies and in 2019, the wreckage of the plane was recovered from the mountains.

A few days ago, the 1968 crash once again made headlines when the army recovered four bodies, including that of Cherian.

When the news reached the family, it felt like “the suffocation of 56 years had suddenly evaporated”, Mr Thomas told BBC Hindi.

“I was finally able to breathe again,” he says.

Cherian, the second of five children, was just 22 years old when he went missing. He had boarded the aircraft to get to his first field posting in the Himalayan region of Leh.

It was only in 2003, when the first body was found, that his status was moved from missing to dead.

“Our father died in 1990 and our mother in 1998, both waiting for news about their missing son,” says Mr Thomas.