After 46 years after it went missing, an Indian diplomatic bag containing newspapers, magazines, calendars and mails reached the foreign office in New Delhi. The bag had went missing after an Air India Flight had crashed in the French Alps in January 1966.
The canvas bag was found by mountain rescue worker Arnaud Christmann and his neighbour Jules Berger on August 21, on Mont Blanc. The bag weighed about 9 kgs and stamped ‘Diplomatic Mail’ and ‘Ministry of External Affairs’.
The mountain rescue workers had found something shining on the Bossons glacier, close to where the Air India flight which was flying from Mumbai to New York had crashed in January 1966. The flight crash had killed all the 117 people which included the top Indian nuclear scientist Homi J. Bhabha.
The diplomatic bag was then handed over to the police in the town of Chamonix and later it was given to India by France early this month. The bag which was found was a C category bag which did not contain any classified material but contained the copies of newspapers like Hindustan Times, The Hindu and The Statesman which were sent as reading material for the Indian diplomatic missions. Another prized commodity the bag had was an Air India calendar of 1966.
