Beas tragedy: One more swollen body recovered

One more body of a Hyderabad engineering college student was recovered Friday from the Beas river, taking the total bodies retrieved to 13.

Eleven students and a tour operator are still missing. The latest victim was identified as B. Mahen Sai Raj and his swollen body surfaced from the river bed near the Pandoh dam, the police said.

In the past two days, four swollen bodies surfaced.

Rescuers said the remaining bodies, which are in the process of getting bloated, would automatically start surfacing in the water.

Mandi Deputy Commissioner Devesh Kumar told IANS that search operation continued for the 12th day Friday to locate the bodies of the remaining students.

They were swept away June 8 after water was released into the river without a warning from nearby 126 MW Larji hydropower project.

The focus of the search operation is on the 15-km-long downstream stretch of the river from the Larji project dam to the Pandoh dam.

A government inquiry report, submitted to the Himachal Pradesh High Court in Shimla Thursday, pointed out gross negligence by the Larji project authorities in releasing water into the river.

After going through the report, a division bench of Chief Justice Mansoor Ahmad Mir and Justice Tarlok Singh Chauhan directed the state to file status report in the court by June 24 about the steps it initiated after the completion of the probe.

The students were from the V.N.R. Vignana Jyothi Institute of Engineering and Technology in Hyderabad and they were on an excursion to Manali.

The tragedy occurred when a group of students reached the river bed for a picture-postcard shoot with the gurgling river in the background. A sudden wall of water released into the river swept all of them away.