india

Updated: Oct 19, 2019 21:40 IST

Six people were killed when a car in which they were travelling plunged into an irrigation canal in Telangana’s Suryapet district late on Friday night, the police said.

The incident happened at Munagala of Nadigudem block close to Kodad at around 10 pm. The speeding SUV rammed into the railing of the Hyderabad-Vijayawada national highway (NH 65) and fell off the road into a canal that carries Krishna River water from the Nagarjunasagar reservoir to irrigate crops in Telangana and parts of Andhra.

The bodies of the six victims -- Abdul Aziz (45), Rajesh (29), Jhonson (33), Santosh Kumar (23), Naresh (35) and Pavan Kumar (23) – all employees of a private hospital at A S Rao Nagar in Hyderabad, were retrieved along with the SUV after hectic efforts at about 2 pm on Saturday.

The victims, along with five others left for their colleague’s marriage at Nadigudem in the morning. After dinner, they started back to Hyderabad in two separate vehicles – six of them in the SUV and five others in a Tata Indica car. But as they were trying to cross the bridge over Nagarjunasagar left canal, the SUV lost control, hit the railing, overturned and plunged into the canal.

“The other friends who were following them in another vehicle immediately alerted the locals, who in turn informed the police. As the water in the canal was flowing at a high speed and it was dark all along the canal, the car could not be located immediately,” Munagala inspector Shiva Shankar Goud told reporters.

Kodad MLA Bollem Mallaiah Yadav, collector Ameya Kumar and superintendent of police R Bhaskaran, rushed to the spot late in the night to undertake the rescue operations.

The collector asked the irrigation department authorities to stop releasing water from the Nagarjunasagar into the left canal, so that the vehicle could be traced.

Search operations resumed on Saturday morning, when a team of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) headed by Rahul Dixit was summoned. After hours of intense search, they could locate the SUV a few kilometres away from the accident spot and retrieved it using cranes.

“All the six bodies were found inside the vehicle. Apparently, they could not escape as the doors of the vehicle were locked and windows could not be opened,” the police said.

The bodies were shifted to the local government hospital for post-mortem after which they would be handed over to the family members, the police said.