Emergency Relief Team Joins Search Today; Death Toll Exceeds 1,000

[Anchor]

While ground searches continue to find nine South Korean nationals missing in the massive floods in Nepal, South Korea's overseas emergency relief team arrived in Nepal this morning (the 2nd) and is joining the operation on site. The death toll from these massive floods has now exceeded 1,000, with about 4,400 people reported missing.

Reporter Son Gijun has the details.

[Reporter]

The South Korean rapid response team focused its search around the water intake weir dam in the upper reaches of the river, where Korean nationals are suspected to be missing.

This area is highly likely to have housed local employees, including one South Korean national, at the time of the accident.

The response team repeatedly deployed drones into the canyon around the dam for observation, and starting yesterday morning, they began full-scale overland searches with the assistance of the Nepalese military.

[Jeon Gi-baek / Head of the Government Joint Rapid Response Team: The drones showed quite meaningful results yesterday, so we are heading down to check on that as well....]

However, the area around the office building across from the powerhouse—a power generation facility on the downstream side where the eight missing South Roreans are believed to have been at the time of the accident—has not yet been searched.

The search is gradually expanding from areas with the highest probability of finding missing persons, but no news regarding the missing has been heard yet.

The 44-member overseas emergency relief team, organized following an official request from the Nepalese government, departed aboard a military transport plane at midnight today.

They are scheduled to join the search operations as soon as they arrive locally this morning.

Meanwhile, news broke that 118 Nepalese nationals and one British man have been rescued.

[Nepalese Army Public Relations Official: (Among the 118 rescued Nepalese) 44 were women and 74 were men. In addition, one British man was rescued during this search and rescue operation. Search and rescue operations are ongoing.]

Memorial events honoring the victims continued across various parts of Nepal.

[Abdul Karim / Memorial Event Participant: Whether Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or Muslim, religion does not matter. We are all human, and we put people first. That is why we have gathered here to pray together.]

It is estimated that the death toll from the floods in Nepal and China has surpassed 1,000 in total, with the number of missing persons increasing to approximately 4,400.

(Camera Reporter: Joo Yong-jin, Kim Han-gyeol | Video Editor: Lee So-young)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.