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Five German climbers, including a 17-year-old girl, have died after being swept away by an avalanche in the Italian Alps, rescuers have said.
Italian media said three groups of climbers – believed to have been travelling independently of one another – had been caught in the torrent of snow as it pulsed down a mountain near the Swiss border in the north-eastern region of South Tyrol on Saturday.
“The first group, consisting of three people, was completely buried,” Italy’s alpine rescue services said on social media. The bodies of the three – two men and a woman – were recovered on Saturday.
Two of the climbers were reportedly ahead of the others and managed to escape the cascade of snow and ice. After sounding the alarm, they were taken to a hospital in the nearby city of Bolzano, where they were reportedly treated for shock.
By nightfall on Saturday, two others – a man and his 17-year-old daughter – remained missing. Rescuers had little hope that they would be found alive, given that they had fallen about 200 metres (656ft), Olaf Reinstadler, a spokesperson for the Sulden mountain rescue service, told the German news agency dpa late on Saturday.
As daylight broke on Sunday the search, involving a helicopter, drones and thermal imaging, resumed. Soon after, the bodies of both the missing mountaineers were found.
“They had been dragged to the lower part of the gully where the avalanche occurred,” Federico Catania, an Alpine rescue spokesperson, told the Associated Press. “Rescue teams are now returning to the valley, also considering the worsening weather conditions at high altitude.”
The avalanche hit at about 4pm on Saturday while the climbers were using crampons and ice axes to summit Cima Vertana, in the Ortler mountain range, at an altitude of more than 3,500 metres (11,500ft).
They were believed to be just a few hundred metres from the summit at the time, rescuers said, adding that it was not known why the climbers had been approaching the summit at such a relatively late hour.
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No other climbers were believed to be in the area, which is a popular tourist destination. The risk of avalanches had not been high on Saturday, with the newspaper Corriere della Sera suggesting that the avalanche could have been triggered by factors that included a sudden wind as well as a snowdrift that had collected on the summit in recent days.
According to the Associated Press, avalanches are a persistent issue in the Italian Alps, with the average 10-year death toll ranking higher than in most other major ski nations. The number of accidents has increased in recent years, possibly due to more people heading to back-country areas immediately after fresh snowfall.
