Nepalese police are racing against time to find gold and bank vaults swept away by the catastrophic floods that recently hit the country, in a daunting task to prevent the money and gold from falling into the wrong hands.
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In addition to searching for the hundreds of people missing as a result of the flash floods that hit Nepal, the country's police face the extremely difficult task of tracking down and securing the vaults of at least 20 banks that were swept away by the floods, for fear that they might fall into the wrong hands.
Officials reported that some of these safes contained huge sums of cash and valuable possessions.
Nepal Police spokesman, Deputy Inspector General Abi Narayan Kavli, said that the top priority under the current difficult circumstances is to search for the missing, but maintaining public order in the affected areas remains an indispensable necessity.
Kafli explained that banks in Rasua, Dhading, Chitwan and other areas suffered severe damage as a result of the floods, noting that the torrents swept away or buried many safes under thick layers of silt, and those safes contained money and valuables, including gold.
He stressed that police officers are doing their utmost to find and secure those safes, noting that there have been incidents in which people broke into safes swept away by the water and stole the money inside.
In this context, the Dhading district police arrested 29 people on charges of stealing the equivalent of 9 million and 200 thousand Nepalese rupees from a safe that was swept away by the waters from the upper Rasua district.
The police spokesman reported that members of his forces managed on Sunday evening to secure a safe belonging to the Agricultural Development Bank branch in the town of Trishuli in the Denghe region, but the operation took about 8 hours.
According to Kavli, the safe contained 15 million Nepalese rupees in cash, in addition to valuables including gold worth 500 million rupees. Police also secured another safe belonging to Krishi Vikas Bank in the Nuwakot area, which also contained cash and gold.
The spokesman added that the forces deployed about 8,000 personnel in search and rescue operations in the affected areas, noting that 25 police officers were missing as a result of the disaster, while the bodies of three of them were recovered.
China Central Television reported today, citing Nepalese police, that the death toll from last week's landslide in northern Nepal has risen to 1,056.
