Skydivers claim highest landing ever near Everest

KATHMANDU (Reuters Life!) - Three skydivers, including one Indian, made the highest parachute landing ever at a drop zone near Mount Everest, Nepal officials said on Thursday.

Two Britons, Leo Dickinson and Ralph Mitchell, and one Indian, Ramesh Tripathi, sky-dived from a plane flying at 20,000 feet (6,100 metres) on Tuesday.

"They landed at the highest zone at Gorakshep," Tourism Ministry official Dipendra Poudel said. "This will open a new adventure tourism event in Nepal and more skydivers are coming to Nepal."

Gorakshep is a small patch of flat land at 16,940 feet near Mount Everest.

Bikrum Pandey, chief of Nepali hiking agency Himalaya Expeditions that provided logistics to the skydivers said it was a "test jump" to see if Gorakshep could become a safe landing site for regular skydiving.

New Zealand's Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzingb Norgay Sherpa first climbed Mount Everest's 8,850-metre (29,000 feet) peak in 1953.

More than 3,600 climbers -- including a 16-year-old boy, a 76-year-old man, a man with an artificial limb and a blind person -- have since scaled the world's highest mountain.

(Reporting by Gopal Sharma, Editing by Nita Bhalla & Jan Dahinten)