Finally The Children Are Saved from Dangling Cable car

 

 

'I lost hope,' says survivor

Students use cable cars to avoid long mountain road trips

Pakistani commandos led the risky rescue operation

A nation united in prayer, says acting prime minister

Yesterdays Reporting

 

PESHAWAR, Pakistan,  (Reuters) - When Pakistani villager Gul Faraz rang his family to raise the alarm that a cable had snapped and he and seven schoolchildren were trapped in a cable car swaying in the wind high above a rocky ravine, he doubted he would ever see home again.

"It is an unforgettable day," Faraz said on Wednesday, a day after army commandos performed a miraculous rescue, winching two to safety with a helicopter, and bringing the rest down on a zip line when it became too dark to fly safely in the gusting winds.

 

"I can't tell you what we experienced yesterday when one cable of the cable car suddenly snapped and we were stranded in the air," said Faraz, who at 20 years old was the only adult aboard, and the only person with a mobile phone.

He called his family first, and then the television channel Geo News, whose coverage quickly drew the attention of the world's media to the drama unfolding in the remote mountains of northwestern Pakistan.

It is a part of the world where cable cars and rickety rope bridges are the fastest way to move from a village on one hillside to its nearest neighbor across ravines and valleys.

The owner and the operator of the cable car have since been arrested, police said on Wednesday, though the allegations against them were not clear.

The schoolchildren, aged between 10 and 16, had been coming down from their homes in Jhangri to a school in Battangi, comprising two villages in the Allai valley, when the calamity struck at around 7 a.m. local time.