Precious Stones Had Likely Been On Board An Air India Flight Which Went Down In The Alps

A French hiker nearing the summit of Mont Blanc on a recent expedition happened to see the corner of a metal box sticking up out of the snow.

The box was discovered to contain nearly 100 precious stones worth about $332,000 that may have been aboard an Air India flight which had gone down in the French Alps as many as 63 years ago.

The U.K. newspaper The Guardian reports that there have been two such accidents, one in 1950 and one in 1966. In total, more than 100 people were fatally injured in the two accidents.

The climber turned in the gemstones to the local police, who are attempting to trace them back to their original owner or his or her family. Local police chief Sylvian Merly called that climber "very honest" for immediately returning the gems. He said climbers on Mont Blanc are generally well aware of the history of the accidents on the mountain, and it was obvious to the climber that the stones were connected to one of them.

Merly said the box was discovered on the Bossons glacier, which has regularly given up artifacts from the two Air India accidents. Last year, two climbers found a bag of diplomatic mail that had been on a Boeing 707 traveling from Mumbai to New York in 1966.

(Air India 707 image used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. Photo from the Eduard Marmet Collection)

FMI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc