All eight people - seven students and their teacher - have been rescued from a stranded cable car over a ravine in Pakistan, officials have said, ending an ordeal that lasted more than 15 hours.
The high-risk operation was completed successfully in the darkness of night after the cable car snagged early in the morning, leaving it hanging precariously at an angle.
"All the kids have been successfully and safely rescued," caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar said in apost on messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
"Great team work by the military, rescue departments, district administration as well as the local people."
A helicopter rescue operation was called off as night fell, media and a security source said. Flood lights were installed and a ground-based rescue operation continued into the night.
The source said that cable crossing experts had been sent by the military to the area north of Islamabad and had been trying to rescue the group one by one by transferring them onto a small platform along the cable.
A video shared by a rescue agency official showed more than a dozen rescuers and locals lined up near the edge of the dark ravine, pulling on a cable until a boy attached to it by a harness reached the hillside safely to cries of "God is great".
Residents said community members from surrounding areas who had experience rescuing people this way had also arrived.
"It is a slow and risky operation. One person needs to tie himself with a rope and he will go in a small chairlift and rescue them one by one," said Abdul Nasir Khan, a resident, before all people stranded were recovered.
One of the cable lines carrying the car snapped at around 7am (3am Irish time) as the students were travelling to school in a remote mountainous area in Battagram, about 200km north of Islamabad, officials said.
Two children were rescued by helicopter, one by one, district official Shah Fahad and the military's media said.
Television footage showed one child being lifted off the cable car by a helicopter in a harness, swinging side to side before being carried to the ground.
The cable car became stranded halfway across the ravine, about 275 metres above ground, said Shariq Riaz Khattak a rescue official at the site.
The helicopter rescue mission had been complicated by gusty winds in the area and the fact that the helicopters' rotor blades risked further destabilising the lift, he said.
"Our situation is precarious, for god's sake do something," Gulfaraz, a 20-year-old on the cable car, told local television channel Geo News over the phone. He said the children were aged between 10 and 15 and one had fainted due to heat and fear.
The rescue effort has transfixed the country, with Pakistanis crowded around television sets, as local media showed footage of an emergency worker dangling from a helicopter cable close to the small cabin, with those onboard cramped together.
Crowds of villagers gathered on the hillside anxiously watching the operation.
