Chamba: Eight individuals, including two children, were killed when their vehicle rolled down a treacherous mountain highway in Himachal Pradesh’s Chamba district. The fatal accident occurred on Friday night along the remote Bairagarh-Sach Pass-Killar route as the victims, who were tourists visiting from Bengaluru, were travelling across the high-altitude terrain. Their vehicle veered off the road and plunged into a 500-metre-deep gorge, prompting an intensive local investigation into the cause of the crash.
According to regional administrative details, two vacationing families from Bengaluru had booked a Maruti Ertiga taxi from Dalhousie on Friday morning to explore the snow-covered peaks around the scenic Sach Pass Jot area. Alarm bells were raised by the vehicle’s owner on Friday night when the taxi failed to return to its base in Dalhousie after several hours. Suspecting an emergency, the owner cross-referenced the vehicle’s integrated GPS data, which indicated that the car had become stationary near the remote Kalavan area without any signs of subsequent movement, triggering an immediate search operation.
Formal notification reached the local administration on Saturday afternoon, but rescue teams faced extreme logistical hurdles in reaching the crash site. The exceptionally rugged topography, combined with near-vertical cliffs and highly adverse weather conditions, prevented emergency personnel from retrieving the bodies from the deep chasm on Saturday.
A recovery operation was successfully mobilized on Sunday morning, with rescue teams and local volunteers forming human chains and using heavy ropes to pull the bodies out of the precipitous gorge. Recovery efforts have been further complicated by a total lack of mobile network coverage in the remote mountain pass, leaving base operators temporarily unable to maintain direct communications with the field team. Local police have officially registered a case to pinpoint the exact mechanical or environmental factors that led to the tragedy, and the bodies are being transported to a regional medical facility for post-mortem examinations before being handed over to their grieving relatives.
