- Eight cable car passengers were saved after hours spent dangling 900 feet over a ravine in Pakistan.
- At least one was rescued via helicopter and the rest were saved via zip line once darkness fell.
Rescuers saved children from a dangling cable car in Pakistan with a risky operation that involved them sliding to safety on zip lines.
The eight cable car passengers — seven students and one teacher — had been traveling to school via cable car in a remote region of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province in Pakistan early Tuesday morning when two of the cables snapped, The New York Times reported.
The passengers were trapped in the car, dangling about 900 feet above a mountainous ravine for more than six hours until authorities arrived to begin their hourslong rescue mission, the Times reported.
At least one of the students was rescued via helicopter, as seen in a terrifying video posted online of the passenger flying out of the car while attached to a rope and slowly being pulled up into the aircraft.
"It is a delicate rescue operation," the local mayor, Mufti Ghulamullah, told the New York Times. "With each attempt to bring the rescuer closer to the cable car using the helicopter, the gusts of wind from the rotor would jolt and unsettle the chairlift, causing the children to cry out in fear."
Once night fell, the helicopter rescue had to be called off in favor of a zip line, which was used to save the remaining passengers, the Times reported, citing the Pakistani military.
Local journalist Zahid Gishkori posted a video to X showing several of the students strapped to rescuers on the zip line as they're pulled to safety in the forested darkness, as onlookers cheer.
"It involved not just the military but the local expertise, including brave volunteers from the area as well," Al Jazeera correspondent Kamal Hyder said. "There is a sigh of relief across the country."
Anwaar ul Haq Kakar, the caretaker prime minister of Pakistan, has since called for an investigation into the safety of all private cable car operations in the country.