Thakur with his wife

Darjeeling, May 24: Sangat Ram Thakur who was injured during an expedition to Mount Makalu died at a nursing home in Kathmandu today.

“Thakur was taken out of the life support system this morning,” a source at Darjeeling’s Himalayan Mountaineering Institute (HMI), which had organised the expedition said. The institute will organise a condolence meeting at 11am tomorrow. Family sources said the funeral will take place in Kathmandu.

The 36-year-old instructor, who had been with the HMI for the past two years, was part of the 16-member Indo-Bangla team that scaled the fifth highest peak on May 19.

Lakpa Doma Sherpa, Thakur’s mother-in-law, had earlier said the family had received a call from the HMI on the evening of May 19 saying the climber had a fall while skiing on Mount Makalu and had been airlifted from the base camp to Nepal’s Kathmandu.

“There was a haemorrhage on the right side of the head. He was immediately put on a ventilator in the ICU,” she had said. Soon after getting the information, Rinchen Lhamu Sherpa, Thakur’s wife, had left for Kathmandu with their two sons.

With communication remaining a problem, it is not yet clear how Thakur had met with the accident.

Rinchen had married Thakur, who originally hails from Manali, in 2000. Their two sons are three and six years old. Her brother, Kesang Sherpa, is also in Kathmandu.

Thakur was keen on adventure sports and many believed that he was the first paraglider from Darjeeling.

According to the HMI source, the team has started trekking from the base camp. “The members were scheduled to take a chopper to Kathmandu but because of bad weather they have been forced to trek. It will take them at least five days to reach Kathmandu,” said the source.

On May 19, Col Neeraj Rana, the leader of the Rs 1.9-crore expedition, had called up The Telegraph to say five members of his team — Kusang Sherpa, Powell Sharma, Neel Chand, Rajendra Singh and Raj Pal — had scaled the peak. Khalid Mohammed and Nishat Mazumdar from Bangladesh were also part of the expedition.

Thakur had not climbed the top and was probably trying to ski around the advance base camp area, which was located at 18,700ft.

During the expedition, Col Rana had set a world record by paragliding from the highest point in Mount Makalu. He had taken 17 minutes to reach advance base camp from Camp II which was at 22,473 feet.

The team had also created a record by sending the maximum number of climbers to the peak. Apart from the five members of the HMI, five Sherpas had also scaled the peak on May 19.