At least 33 people were killed and 20 others injured when a bus carrying 45-50 members of a marriage party fell into a gorge in Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal district, police said on Wednesday.
The bus was on its way to Kanda Village in Bironkhal from Laldhang town in Haridwar when it fell into a 500-metre gorge near Simri bend at around 7 PM on Tuesday, they said.
Rescue operations were carried out throughout the night, police said. As many as 18 bodies have been retrieved so far while seven-eight bodies could still be trapped inside the bus, they added. Twenty people injured in the accident were pulled out of the mangled remains of the bus and rushed to hospitals in Bironkhal, Rikhnikhal and Kotdwar, police said.
They said two of the injured died on the way to hospital.
A rescue operation was launched soon after the incident on Tuesday evening. However, efforts of the rescuers were hampered by darkness. Villagers then used flashlights on their mobile phones to rescue those stuck inside the bus as there was no arrangement of lights at the site of the accident, eyewitnesses said on Tuesday. Later, officials rushed to the site and ambulances, lighting and life-saving equipment were arranged.
Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, who along with former Union Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank on Tuesday arrived for an on-the-spot assessment of the situation, met the people hospitalised in Kotdwar.