Shimla, June 18 (IANS) All seven occupants, comprising three women, belonging to a village, were killed when their SUV skidded off the road and fell into a 500-metre-deep gorge at midnight in Chamba in Himachal Pradesh, police said on Thursday.

The accident took place near Chhatrund on the Masrund-Hamal route. Police came to know about the accident in the morning when passersby saw the vehicle lying in the gorge.

It took hours for rescuers to climb down the mountain and bring up the bodies one after the other through narrow hilly paths.

Prima facie, the police said the cause of the accident was that the driver of the SUV lost control over the vehicle and plunged into a gorge.

The victims, comprising the driver, were returning home after attending a religious ceremony when the accident occurred.

Locals said the administration had a tough time extricating the victims from the badly mangled vehicle.

People in the area began rescue operations even before local authorities reached the spot. The victims belonged to Chamba district. The victims belonged to Mahal village, which falls in the gram panchayat of Kuthed.

The residents of Mahal had gone to attend a ‘mundan’ ceremony held in Kakadotha village, part of the panchayat. After the ceremony, they were returning home in the SUV.

Chamba is one of the remotest places in the state, and scarcity and low frequency of passenger buses in the district lead to overcrowding of the vehicles.

The accident spot has earned the notoriety of being accident-prone owing to narrow and winding roads, steep slopes, and often poor road conditions, all of which pose a risk of accidents.

Locals said the accident spot lacks crash barriers. They said if safety measures had been in place, this accident could have been avoided.

Police have registered a case and started an investigation into the cause of the accident.

–IANS

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