Five persons, including the owner of a prominent hotel of Bhubaneswar, died in a road accident near Purusottamballaav village along the Puri-Malatipatpur bypass road under the Chandanpur police station on Friday midnight.
Police retrieved the bodies from the ill-fated car and sent them to the District Headquarters Hospital here for postmortem.
The deceased were owner of Blue Wheel Hotel and resident of Bargarh, Bhubaneswar, Atish Kumar Sahu (40) and the hotel manager Debendra Das (35), cloth merchant Sibu Poddar (45) of Jholasahi, Cuttack, Swasttik Rath (28) of Jaidurga Nagar, Bhubaneswar and driver Tulu of Ganjam.
According to sources, all the five persons had joined a feast at the Ramchandi temple located along the Puri-Konark Marine Drive road. After participating in the feast, they were returning by the BMW car of Atish late in the night. While they were passing through the Marine Drive-Malatipatpur by pass road, the driver lost control of the vehicle, which skidded off the road and plunged into a roadside ditch near Purusottamballav village.
Police said that since the car overturned into the ditch full of water, its occupants could not open the door and got trapped in the vehicle. They died of asphyxiation.
Since the bypass road is deserted and the accident occurred in dead of the night, nobody had noticed the mishap. On Saturday morning nearby villagers informed the police about the tragic incident. The bodies were recovered from the car submerged under the muddy water.