An American student studying at a prestigious Swiss boarding school was killed by an avalanche while skiing, school officials said Wednesday.

LEYSIN, Switzerland — An American student studying at a prestigious Swiss boarding school was killed by an avalanche while skiing, school officials said Wednesday.
    Spencer Akers, an 18-year-old from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was due to graduate this year, said Doris Ott, an administrator at the Leysin American School.
    Akers had been skiing Tuesday off marked trails in the mountains above the town with two fellow pupils when he got separated from them, Ott told The Associated Press. The alarm was raised later that day after he failed to return to the school. A search and rescue team that was sent out found his body beneath 2 meters (6.5 feet) of snow.
    “In close to 50 years we have never lost a student or a staff member on the slopes,” Ott said, adding that pupils had been repeatedly instructed not to ski off-piste. “We drill this into the students.”
    Akers was a “top skier” who would have raced with the school’s downhill team later this week, Ott added.
    He is the fourth avalanche victim in Switzerland this winter.

France, Japan also hit by deadly slides
    Rescuers on Wednesday found the body of an English skier who was killed in an avalanche in the French Alps, officials said.  
    Stephen Gladman, 47, was skiing off-piste Tuesday when the avalanche swept a slope near the town of La Plagne, burying him headfirst beneath the snow, according to police.
    Two other skiers were killed Tuesday in another avalanche between the towns of Corbier and Tignes, police said.
    The national Meteo-France weather service has warned that unstable snow cover in the Haute-Savoie and the Alpes de Haute-Provence regions has increased the risk of avalanches there.  
    An avalanche in northern Japan killed two backcountry skiers and injured seven others Wednesday, police said.
    After battling a blizzard for hours, rescuers pulled out a missing skier alive from underneath the avalanche, which struck in the northern prefecture (state) of Aomori.
    The disaster struck shortly before noon on Mount Hakkoda in Aomori when the party of 24 — all Japanese nationals — were skiing down the ungroomed mountain trails. Aomori is about 576 kilometers (360 miles) northeast of Tokyo.

— The Associated Press