Kathmandu (Nepal) (AFP) – In the Nepalese capital Kathmandu, those who have been desperately searching for their loved ones since last week's devastating flood have come to plaster their portraits on a wall of the missing, their last hope of finding them.

Published on: 01/09/2026 - 08:03

About 25 meters long, the photos of Nepalis and foreigners of all ages rise as high as possible, spilling over columns that stand in front of the university hospital.

Nearly 4,500 people are missing after the collapse of a Himalayan glacier which triggered a tsunami of water and mud in Nepal and neighboring Tibet in Chinese territory, including almost 4,000 in Nepal alone.

“My brother is still missing,” says Prakash Chhetri, 46, after posting his photo on the wall.

The man in the blue shirt hopes that his brother, driver of a group of nine pilgrims, is still alive, since one of his passengers survived.

At the top of the wall, photos of members of the same family are visible: a 30-year-old woman, another 35-year-old with her 8-year-old daughter.

Images of young sporty men - one of whom was wearing dark glasses and a sports jacket when he disappeared, the ad specifies - alongside that of a mother wearing a cap, proudly carrying a toddler in her arms.

Debu Sapkota, a 58-year-old driver, came to paste him with photos of his 83-year-old mother-in-law and her granddaughter, who disappeared in the town of Trishuli Bazaar swept away by the wave last Wednesday.

An alert to evacuate sounded, but the old lady was "too old to run", he testifies. According to a witness, who saw her go into the waves, "her granddaughter helped her escape but they were both swept away."

Debu Sapkota says he no longer has “hope that they have survived”. “I am here in the hope of finding their bodies,” he said, brandishing portraits of the two missing people in festive clothes.

Puffy faces

Numerous photos of Chinese workers and engineers working on the construction sites of several hydroelectric power stations have been posted. Just like that of a Chinese trader who came to declare goods at the Rasuwa border post.

Next to it, portraits of several Indian pilgrims and an American tourist also appear.

The crowd presses continuously in front of this gallery, some film the alignment of the printed faces.

A few aisles further, near the morgue of the medical complex, photos of bodies extracted from the mud, their faces puffy, are displayed.

Raj Kumari Tamang, a 20-year-old woman wearing a mask, went to the morgue in search of her father.

“My father, Moti Lal Tamang, had gone to pay electricity at Trishuli Bazaar,” she says, “his geolocation shows him near the Trishuli bridge, but I don’t know more.”

Police have an office in an open-air courtyard to help identify bodies.

“As of Monday, we have received 94 bodies,” explains to AFP a police officer, O.M. Bahadur Rana, in charge of managing the bodies after the disaster, specifying that all the remains were a priori Nepalese.

“We only identified 12 bodies and handed them over to the families,” adds the agent.

This desperate effort to find the victims continues online, on a government site which brings together information on survivors and the missing, with numerous calls for help.

“Yesterday we saw a video of a child struggling to get out of the mud that trapped him, and who looked like my nephew, Suvansh Ghimire, who was swept away by the flood,” one message said.

© 2026 AFP

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