A person can strike a pot of gold anywhere, including the mountains. Proving this, is a French climber, who got a trove of gems that he found on Mont Blanc. The climber in 2013 had ascended Mont Blanc and found something he wouldn’t have dreamed of — $340,000 worth of precious stones in a box.

According to the Agence France-Presse (AFP), the assortment of precious stones – rubies, sapphires and emeralds – are suspected to be from an Air India flight that crashed in 1966 on the mountains whose passengers included father of India’s nuclear programme, Homi Jehangir Bhabha.

Following Bhabha’s death several conspiracy theories too came up about the crash.

The person who has not been named had handed over the gems to the authorities as per the French law. With the efforts of the authorities to find their rightful owner having failed, the climber was given half of them while the remaining will be kept by the Government in Chamonix, France.

The highest summit in western Europe, Mont Blanc’s height is 15,777 feet and it has been central to two separate Air India air crashes – 1950 and 1966.

The 1966 accident claimed all its 117 passengers and crew members.

The craft named Kanchenjanga was flying from Mumbai to New York and it was on its Beirut to Geneva leg that it crashed.

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, had honoured the victims of the both crashes in 2019.