Car falls 300m, tourists spend night in wreckage

Manali: Four tourists from Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and UP were killed and three of their friends seriously injured after the SUV they were travelling in plunged into a 300-metre-deep gorge near Ghiyagi village near the 10,500-foot-high Jalori Pass in Himachal Pradesh’s Kullu district on Sunday night.
The tourists were stuck in the wreckage all night as nobody noticed them in the secluded area amid the dense forest when the accident took place at 8pm.
Police said the driver lost control of the vehicle and it rolled 300 metres down the mountainside. When the vehicle was rolling down, an occupant identified as Kumari Astha fell out of the vehicle and she got stuck in the shrubs with minor scratches.
Though she could not climb up to the road or climb down to the flat base, she kept screaming for help all night. However, it was only in the morning that a local woman heard her screams and police were informed about the accident at 9.15am, almost 13 hours after the accident.
A police team rushed to the spot to launch a rescue operation with the help of local residents. They found four people, including a woman, dead and three injured. The injured were rushed to the regional hospital in Kullu for treatment. The bodies were retrieved after a lot of effort and were taken into police custody for the postmortem examination.
Kullu additional superintendent of police Sagar Chandra said the tourists were returning from Jalori Pass towards Ghiyagi when the accident occurred at 8pm on Sunday. “Nobody noticed the victims despite the screams as the area is isolated, has a dense forest and it was night. The postmortem will be conducted on Tuesday, after the family members of the victims reach Kullu,” he said.
The deceased include Vishwas Sardana (26) of Haryana who was driving the vehicle, Harshiv Sahgal (28), of Delhi, Saloni (27) of Uttar Pradesh, and Vinayak Pandey of Zirakpur, Punjab. Kumari Astha (26) of Delhi, Sakshi of UP and Vivek survived the accident, police said.
The Banjar-Jalori Pass stretch of the Aut-Luhri national highway 305 is narrow and steep and it mostly passes through dense forest. The area is very prone to accidents. Few vehicles ply on the route at night. As the rescue teams reached the victims 13 hours after the accident, the seriously injured could not get timely help.