In August 2012 two men found a bag of Indian diplomatic mail lying on a glacier below Mont Blanc. It had been on the plane that killed Homi Bhabha
On 21 August 2012 some tourists came down into Chamonix and told Arnaud Christmann, who worked in mountain rescue, that they had seen something shining on the Bossons glacier. He and his neighbour, Jules Berger, went up to look.
They found pieces of an aircraft cabin, a shoe, loose cables and a wheel. Twenty metres further on was a jute sack stamped “Diplomatic Mail” and “Ministry of External Affairs.” Christmann said afterwards that it was sitting as if someone had just put it down.
They had been hoping for diamonds, or at least some gold. What they got was a sack of soaking wet letters and Indian newspapers. Christmann joked that the mail was going to arrive forty-six years late.
The sack had been lying on the mountain since the morning of 24 January 1966.
The Kanchenjunga
That morning an Air India Boeing 707 named Kanchenjunga, after the Himalayan peak, was coming down towards Geneva on the last leg of a flight from Bombay by way of Delhi and Beirut. There were 106 passengers and eleven crew on board. It had left Beirut with one of its VOR receivers, the radio aid pilots use to fix their position, not working.
Somewhere over the Alps the captain worked out his position against Mont Blanc and reported it. The radar controller in Geneva saw the aircraft somewhere else and passed a message meant to correct it. The captain believed he had cleared the ridge and began to descend. At about two minutes past seven the aircraft flew into the mountain a few hundred feet below the summit. Nobody survived.
Sixteen years earlier, another Air India aircraft, the Malabar Princess, had crashed on the same mountain on its way to Geneva.
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Seat of a scientist
One of the passengers was Homi Jehangir Bhabha. He was fifty-six, the chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission and the man who had built the country’s nuclear programme almost from nothing. He was on his way to Vienna.
Lal Bahadur Shastri had died in Tashkent thirteen days before. On the morning Bhabha’s plane hit the mountain, Indira Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister in Delhi. The next day in Bombay, Vikram Sarabhai gave the condolence address, and soon after he took Bhabha’s place.
Bhabha’s body was never recovered.
The glacier has given back the mail, the newspapers and the jewels. It has never given back him.
What was in the bag
The bag went to the police in Chamonix, and India took possession of it that September. In Delhi the Ministry of External Affairs laid out what had survived: calendars, a personal letter, and newspapers whose headlines were forty-six years old. Pindi will implement Tashkent accord. Prisoners swap to start soon. Indira to visit US.
They were the news the passengers had been carrying out of India that week: the agreement Shastri had signed on the night he died, and the woman who would replace him.
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The questions
The official inquiry put the crash down to a navigation error made worse by a misunderstanding between the cockpit and the controller. Some people have never believed it.
An Italian pilot flying nearby that morning, asked by Geneva what he could see, said he saw a black cloud at about 16,000 feet, unlike the other clouds, and wondered if it had come from an explosion. In 2013 a writer named Gregory Douglas published what he said were transcripts of telephone calls from 1993 with a retired CIA officer, Robert Crowley, in which Crowley claimed the agency had put a bomb in the cargo hold to stop India’s bomb. Crowley had been dead for years by the time the book came out. No recording, document or piece of wreckage has ever been produced to support the claim, and Douglas’s earlier work has been widely dismissed as resting on forged documents.
The mountain has not settled it either way. It has only kept giving things back.
Every summer
In 2013 a French climber found a metal box with the Air India logo, full of emeralds, sapphires and rubies. In 2017 human remains were found in the area, from this crash or from the Malabar Princess. In July 2020 Timothée Mottin, who runs a café above Chamonix, found about a dozen Indian newspapers dated 20 and 21 January 1966, dry enough to read once they had thawed. The National Herald announced India’s first woman prime minister.
He planned to put them on display in the café with the rest of what he has found. He told reporters it is not unusual: every time he walks on the glacier with friends, they find something from the crash.
The mail arrived forty-six years late. The man who travelled with it has not arrived at all.
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If you think you have rememberd everything about this topic take this QUIZ
Results
#1. What was the official cause of the Air India Flight 101 crash in 1966, according to the French investigation? ? Hint
Consider the combination of human factors and the aircraft’s technical condition during its final approach.
#2. The Boeing 707 operating as Air India Flight 101 was named after what? ? Hint
The aircraft’s name is shared with a famous Himalayan peak.
#3. What recent discovery from the melting Bossons glacier confirmed the flight was carrying sensitive Cold War-era strategic materials for a US organization? ? Hint
Think about what kind of technology was crucial for monitoring adversaries from space during the 1960s.
#4. According to the book “Conversations with the Crow,” what method was allegedly used by the CIA to assassinate Homi Bhabha? ? Hint
The theory described in the book points to an explosive device hidden somewhere on the plane.
#5. A diplomatic mailbag recovered from the crash site in 2012 contained readable newspapers from January 1966. What major political event in India did they report? ? Hint
The news concerned a significant leadership change in India.
#6. The crash of Air India Flight 101 in 1966 was eerily similar to what previous incident? ? Hint
Look for another Air India flight that met its end in the French Alps.
#7. What was the primary reason for the renewed interest and frequent discovery of wreckage from Flight 101 decades after the crash? ? Hint
Think about the environmental changes affecting high-altitude, icy regions.
#8. What geopolitical statement made by Homi Bhabha just three months before his death is often cited as a motive in assassination theories? ? Hint
The statement involved a specific timeline for India to develop a powerful weapon.
What was the official cause of Dr. Homi Bhabha’s death?
The official French inquiry concluded the cause was “Controlled Flight Into Terrain” (CFIT). It was attributed to the pilot miscalculating his position and initiating a descent before clearing the Mont Blanc summit, worsened by a faulty VOR receiver.
Why do people believe the CIA killed Homi Bhabha?
The theory stems from a claim by former CIA officer Robert Crowley, who allegedly admitted that the CIA bombed the plane to stop India’s nuclear program. Bhabha had recently announced India could build a bomb in 18 months, which threatened US/Soviet non-proliferation goals.
What strange items have been found in the crash wreckage?
Over the years, the glacier has revealed a bag of precious gems (emeralds/rubies), “Secret” documents from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, and film reels from a US spy satellite tracking program.
Is there any physical evidence of a bomb?
No verifiable forensic evidence of an explosion (like chemical residue or fragmentation) was found by the official investigation. However, the challenging terrain and the total destruction of the aircraft made detailed forensic analysis difficult.
This article is part of our exclusive series Unsolved India. Read the previous chapter: The Lal Bahadur Shastri Death Mystery.
Sources & References
Deccan Herald / AFP, “46 years later, Indian diplomatic bag discovered on Mt Blanc” (2012) — the find by Arnaud Christmann and Jules Berger on 21 August 2012.
Deccan Herald, “Diplomatic bag reaches Delhi” (2012) — the Ministry of External Affairs display and the January 1966 headlines.
The Diplomat, “Sino-Indian Nuclear Rivalry: Glacially Declassified” (2 June 2017) — the time of the crash, the Italian pilot’s report, Sarabhai’s condolence address and the unrecovered remains.
The Tribune / PTI, “Indian newspapers from 1966 recovered from melting French glacier” (13 July 2020) — Timothée Mottin’s find and the earlier discoveries of 2012, 2013 and 2017.
ThePrint, “Sabotage or accident? The theories about how India lost nuclear energy pioneer Homi Bhabha” (2019) — the Crowley claim as published by Gregory Douglas.
