The incident occurred, when a car going from the Drass area to Kargil district in the Ladakh region veered off the highway on 23 July.
Five people were travelling in the car when it fell into the River Suru that passes through the Pakistan-administered side of Kashmir. Only the body of one female passenger could be traced near the accident site.
Socio-religious group Jamiat ul Ulama Isna Asharia Kargil has in a statement urged the governments of India and Pakistan to look at the incident on humanitarian grounds. This is because two of the five bodies have been recovered in the Suru River in Pakistan-administered Kashmir over the last 15 days.
Volunteers of Isna Asharia were part of a massive search operation launched after the accident, and recovered a female's body. The others remain untraceable so far.
The group now states that they have come across various social media posts in the last four days in which reports of the recovery of a body was mentioned in Gilgit-Baltistan’s Kharmang area on the Pakistani side in Kashmir.
The group believes the body has been identified as of Shabir Ahmad, a local of Drass. The recovery comes after another body of a woman was found in the Kharmang area on the Pakistani side of Kashmir, who had also been missing for the past 15 days.
The volunteers have asked the India and Pakistan authorities to trace the remaining bodies and return all of the deceased to their place of residence in Ladakh.
“In the wake of these incidents, the Isna Asharia, Kargil, urges the governments of India and Pakistan, the civil society and the armed forces to help bring these bodies so that they can be handed over to their families for their final rites”, the statement read.
Political activist Sajjad Kargili told Sputnik that the people and representatives of Ladakh want these bodies to be returned to their families as soon as possible.
“It is very important that a mechanism be established for the return of these bodies on humanitarian grounds. The families of the victims have already suffered a loss, and they should be provided an opportunity to carry out the final rites”, he said.
Kargili has also written a letter to the lieutenant governor of Ladakh, Brig. B. D. Mishra, asking him to take the issue to the relevant authorities at the LoC.
The LoC divides the region of Jammu and Kashmir as well as Ladakh between the arch rival nations of India and Pakistan.
The LoC is considered one of the most volatile borders between the two nations. However, a ceasefire in 2021 brought down tensions along the LoC, which had risen after a deadly suicide bombing in 2019.
Ladakh residents, however, are hoping that the authorities on both sides will develop a special mechanism to retrieve these missing bodies without compromising the safety and security of troops posted in the area.