On March 8th, a Soviet era Mi-8 helicopter owned by the state carrier Tajik Air, which was transporting eleven climbers, crashed in the Pamir mountains, according to a statement issued by the Interior Minister.

The helicopter had three crew, and a Tajik translator, and climbers from Austria, Switzerland, Russia, France, Belgium, Germany and Great Britain.

Davlat Habibov, the director of the International Mountaineering Centre Alp-Mashkov, where the climbers were based, said the climbers had picked up by a helicopter in good weather about 2:00 p.m. in the village of Vir, in the Shugnan district. The helicopter crashed in the Gund valley about 50 miles east of Khorog, the provincial capital of Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan (GBAO) region, near the Afghan border.

Read the report at Climbing.com.