A French mountaineer who had found a box containing gems and jewellery from the wreckage of a crashed Boeing 707 plane that crashed in 1966 at the Alps will get to keep half of the fortune. The unnamed climber had found the box while climbing atop a glacier in 2013 at the Mont Blanc in the French Alps and had handed over the same to the authorities.
The metal box with emeralds, sapphires and rubies worth around Rs 1.28 crore was found in the wreckage of Air India Flight 101, which had crashed into Mont Blanc on January 24, 1966. The box had an Air India logo on it. The crash had killed all 177 people including passengers and crew on board, and had scattered the wreckage across the mountainside.
The other half of the gems will be kept by the Chamonix town in France, where the box is been kept. After the discovery of the box, the officials tried to locate its owners or heirs, but as it was not successful, the decision to divide the find between the finder and the town was taken.
The Town officials announced in a Facebook post that two gemmology experts sorted and divided the gems into two equal parts. One half was given to the mountaineer while the other half was given to the town.
Chamonix officials announced that they will display their part of the treasure at the recently enlarged and renovated Chamonix Crystals Museum. The new collection will be open for public from December 19.
The man who is getting the other half said that he would use some of the money from selling some gems to renovate his apartment. He also said that he does not regret for being honest and handing over the box to the police instead of keeping it.
Chamonix Mayor Eric Fournier said that he was very happy with the development, and praised the man for his “integrity” in turning his find over to police, which is required as per law.
The Boeing 707 had crashed at almost exactly the same spot where another Air India flight had crashed in 1950, the Air India Flight. The crash of that Lockheed Constellation aircraft had also killed all 48 people aboard. The wreckage of both the flights was buried by snow and were hidden and preserved for decades.
However, global warming has caused the melting of the snow, and in recent years, the wreckage of the planes, remains of some victims and bodies of mountain climbers etc have been discovered on Mont Blanc. A year before the box was found, a bag of diplomatic mail, stamped ‘On Indian Government Service, Diplomatic Mail, Ministry of External Affairs’, was recovered in 2012, which was collected by Indian officials.
The melting glacier had also unearthed copies of Indian newspapers from the day, with headlines announcing that Indira Gandhi is the new prime minister of the country. Similarly, wreckage, luggage and other remains of both the flights are regularly discovered.
The plane crashed because the pilot had wrongly assumed that the plane had crossed the peak of the mountain, and had started to descend for landing, and directly crashed into the mountain. The Air India flight 101, named ‘Kanchenjunga’, was flying from Bombay to London, with stops at Delhi, Beirut, and Geneva.
The 1966 crash was also subject to conspiracy theories because one of the passengers killed in the accident was Homi Jehangir Bhabha, father of India’s nuclear industry.
