Three Dutch nationals remain missing after deadly Nepal floods

Rescue workers in Nepal are still trying to trace three Dutch nationals among more than 4,000 people reported missing since the devastating floods that swept through the border region with Tibet last week.

They include two tourists, 29-year-old Christiaan Berghuis from Nijkerk and 51-year-old Maaike Moolhuijsen from Haarlem, who were on a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash, a sacred Tibetan mountain, when the disaster struck.

Their names were confirmed by the family support organisation Names de Familie. The third missing person is a Dutch woman who emigrated to Nepal, the foreign affairs ministry said.

The two visitors were part of a group of 80 people who were travelling from Kathmandu to Mount Kailash when a glacier in the Himalaya collapsed on Wednesday morning, causing the Bhote Koshi river to burst its banks and flood a large area with water and mud.

A spokesman for the Isha Foundation, which organised the trip, told RTL Nieuws the immigration office where the travellers were waiting at the time appeared to have been inundated.

Death toll passes 1,000

“At the moment nothing is known about the conditions of the people who were in the immigration office,” the spokesman said. “We are in constant contact with their families and are supporting them in every way possible.

“The last contact we had with our volunteer who was in charge of the group was around nine minutes before the flood happened.”

The Isha foundation was set up in 1992 by Jaggi Vasudev, an Indian yoga teacher better known by the name of Sandhguru.

A spokesman for the foreign affairs ministry said: “Their families in the Netherlands have been unable to contact them. The fear is that they were in the affected area at the moment of the flood.”

The death toll from the floods passed 1,000 on Tuesday as rescue workers continued to pull bodies from the water further downstream.

Altogether nearly 4,000 people are still unaccounted for in Nepal, as well as 546 in Tibet. They include around 900 hydropower workers who have been trapped in flooded tunnels for nearly a week.