Indian rescuers say the chances of finding eight climbers missing in the Himalayas are "bleak".

Two Indian air force helicopters were searching the mountains, but officials said the operation had to be suspended due to unfavourable conditions.

The rescue effort began on Saturday when the climbers did not return to their base camp.

"The first aerial recce has concluded," said Mr Jogdanda earlier on Sunday, confirming an avalanche was feared to have caught the group in the area around India's second-highest peak.

The missing group, including four Britons, two Americans, an Australian and an Indian, began climbing Nanda Devi on 13 May.

Earlier, officials said four other British climbers had been rescued. They have been named by India TV as Mark Thomas, Ian Wade, Kate Armstrong and Zachary Quain.

They were airlifted to safety after being spotted early on Sunday at a base camp near Nanda Devi.

This smaller group had returned to the base camp from Nanda Devi East due to harsh weather conditions, while the eight-member group headed for the summit of another unnamed peak, government official Vijay Kumar Jogdanda said.

The missing group was being led by experienced British mountain guide Martin Moran, whose Scotland-based company Moran Mountain has run numerous expeditions in the Indian Himalayas.

A helicopter searching for eight climbers who went missing in the Indian Himalayas has spotted five bodies, a military source says.

"They were on the same route as the climbers had taken," a source told AFP, referring to the bodies seen.

Authorities are trying to assess how to retrieve the bodies from such treacherous terrain where helicopters cannot land, says the BBC's Yogita Limaya in Mumbai.

Attempts to retrieve the bodies of five climbers from the Himalayas have been postponed.

Officials told the BBC that a helicopter, carrying the rescue team turned back after three failed attempts to drop them on the peak. The tough terrain and the "limitations" of the helicopter had forced them to abort the mission.

The operation is very risky because of harsh weather and rescuers will reconvene to think of another strategy to retrieve the bodies.

Indian authorities have been forced to call off a helicopter mission to recover the bodies of five missing climbers believed to have been killed in an avalanche high in the Himalayas.

Military helicopters set off at dawn from Munsiyari in Uttarakhand in an attempt to retrieve the bodies but the operation had to be postponed after high winds made it impossible to hover anywhere near the spot.

The plan was to drop mountaineers of the Indo-Tibetan border police force on to the ridge where the bodies were lying at an altitude of 5,000 metres, but all three attempts failed.

“The weather forecast was favourable when they set off but at that high altitude it changes in a second. They got close enough to confirm that it is indeed five bodies – four together and one slightly further away – but the helicopters couldn’t hover. It is too dangerous to try again,” said the local district magistrate, Vijar Kumar Logdande, in Uttarakhand.

He added that the bodies were no longer lying on the snow but embedded in ice, which will make it harder to retrieve them.

Logdande said officials and air force personnel were trying to work out an alternative plan to bring the bodies down to the nearest town of Pithoragarh.

“I don’t know the technical details but it will have to be a combination of choppers and men on the ground. We will have to send mountaineers up there on foot and they will need to acclimatise to the high altitude. It’s going to take longer than we thought but we are working on it,” he said.

The bodies of seven climbers who went missing last month have been recovered in the Himalayas, officials say.

A rescue team is searching for the body of an eighth climber, according to Indian officials who spoke to the BBC.

VK Jogdande, the senior official in Pithoragarh, where the mountain is located, told the BBC a team of 25 climbers belonging to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) had successfully retrieved seven bodies on Sunday.

"They have set up a camp there and they have kept the bodies there. They hope to recover the eighth body by tomorrow," he said.

Mr Jogdande said the climbers would require at least three days to bring the bodies to the base camp.

Two teams, comprising nearly 50 climbers, porters and medics, belonging to the ITBP and the Indian Mountaineering Federation (IMF), have travelled to the peak separately to recover the bodies.

The ITBP team were dropped at the base camp by helicopter, while the volunteer climbers of IMF are walking to the peak.

Amit Chowdhury of the IMF said the operation had been risky, and hampered by bad weather.

"Now they have to decide on how to bring the bodies down," he told the BBC. "[Whether they will] try to build a helipad and bring them down or carry them down is a decision that has to be made."