U.S. officials said about 90 U.S. citizens remained unaccounted for Thursday, a day after catastrophic flash floods engulfed a border area of China and Nepal, killing hundreds of people.
In a statement, the U.S. State Department said it is not aware of any U.S. deaths, but three Americans have been rescued.
Many of the missing were on a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash in Tibet, a sacred site for Hindus, Buddhists and others.
Among those on a guided tour was Venus Rajnikant Patel, a 45-year-old Indian-born U.S. citizen who recently moved from St. Louis to Cincinnati to help his family.
Patel’s friend Jolene Gosha said she and her friends knew Patel was in Nepal and were devastated when they realized he was staying at a hotel along the border where the floods swept through.
“We’re just hoping, hoping that by some chance he was able to climb his way out of it,” Gosha said. “I don’t want to give myself false hope because I know the reality is that he's probably not with us.”
Gosha described Patel as an avid traveler who loves dancing and frequently organizes surprise “flash mob” performances for his friends’ weddings and birthdays.
“He’s always smiling from ear to ear,” Gosha said. “He’d dance so goofily and didn’t care who was watching.”
Indian spiritual guru Jaggi Vasudev, also known as Sadhguru, said in a post on X that 77 people returning from Mount Kailash with groups organized by his Isha Foundation were at an immigration center in Gyirong, Tibet, when the floods struck. The Isha Foundation told ABC News that 22 of those 77 people were Americans.
The Isha Foundation is a spiritual organization based in India and has a U.S. campus called the Isha Institute of Inner-sciences, a yoga and meditation retreat center in the mountains near McMinnville, Tennessee.
Talking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, President Donald Trump said U.S. officials have spoken with Nepalese leaders and offered to provide “anything they want.”
Trump said there were 50 or 60 Americans in the area but added that a full accounting hasn’t been completed.
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Associated Press writers Matthew Lee and Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.
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