The avalanche also cut communication lines and shut down roads some 500 kilometers (300 miles) east of the Tajik capital Dushanbe, officials said.

Officials said they were urgently searching the area to see if there were other victims of the incident in the impoverished nation of less than five million people, which suffered through a brutal five-year civil war after the Soviet Union's collapse.

The mountains of Tajikistan were a tourist attraction until a five-year civil war erupted in the 1990s, but many of the sites that attracted visitors were destroyed in the fighting.

TERRA.WIRE