Military helicopters and Pakistani commandos they saved eight people, aincluding six students, who had been trapped for hours yesterday, Tuesday, in the cabin of a makeshift cable car suspended over a deep gorge in a mountainous and isolated area in northwestern Pakistan.

The six children and two adults were trapped on Tuesday morning in the cabin of the cable car, at a height of about 350 meters when one of the two cables holding it broke.

The first child managed to be removed from the cabin by helicopter 12 hours after they were trapped, as the sun was setting. The helicopter was then forced by weather conditions and nightfall to return to base.

Members of the Pakistani special forces then used the cable from which the cabin was hanging as an aerial pulley to rescue the remaining trapped people.

“After tireless efforts by highly skilled pilots and special forces personnel one of the children was rescued but the operation had to be called off due to bad weather conditions,” the Pakistani military said in a statement.

“Additional efforts are being made by members of the special forces and a team specializing in the use of an aerial pulley (zip line) which went to the scene by military helicopter,” the army added.

“I thought the end of me had come,” said Ataullah Shah, one of the rescued boys. “God offered me a second life,” added the 15-year-old.

Pakistani Prime Minister Anwar ul Haq Kakar called the rescuers “heroes of the nation”.

“Excellent work by the team of the army, rescue crews, local authorities and citizens,” he wrote on the X platform (formerly Twitter).

Loudspeakers from the mosque

The two adults were the last to be rescued, said rescue official Bilal Faizi.

Video of the first rescue shows a teenager tied to a rope dangling from the helicopter to the cheers of crowds of local residents and relatives of the stranded who had gathered on both sides of the canyon, which is hours away from any city.

“As soon as everyone was rescued, the families started crying with joy and hugging each other,” said Waqar Ahmad, a member of the rescue services.

“People didn’t stop praying, they were afraid the cable would break. People were praying until the last one was saved,” he added.

The six children used this cable car to go to their schoolaccompanied by the two adults, when one of the cables holding the cabin snapped at about 07:00 yesterday morning (local time, 05:00 Greek time), midway over the Alai Valley.

Residents, who run the cable car themselves, used mosque loudspeakers to alert authorities on the other side of the valley in this part of Pakistan where there are no roads or bridges.

Army helicopters were conducting reconnaissance operations near where the cable car was located and a soldier descended by rope to give the trapped people food, water and medicine, local official Tanvir Ur Rahman said.

Ali Asghar Khan, headmaster of a public school in Battagram, explained that children study there.

“The school is located in a mountainous area and there are no safe roads leading to it, so it is common for (students) to use the cable car,” he noted.

In Pakistan these kinds of things are common improvised cable car that run on cables or often just ropes to connect isolated villages in mountainous areas.

In 2017, 10 people were killed in a similar accident near the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.