Five persons are reported to have died when the car they were travelling in fell off the road about 300 metres down the mountainside at Saudpani near Devprayag on the national highway 58 to Badrinath. The accident took place on Sunday afternoon. The chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat has expressed grief at the deaths caused by the mishap.

According to information from the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF), information was received from the Tehri district control room about a Maruti Swift car with five people in it meeting with an accident near Devprayag. On receiving the information, one team of the SDRF departed for the accident site from Dhalwala while another additional team departed for the site from Jolly Grant with rescue equipment. The five persons in the car with registration plate number HR 26 CF 0719 were travelling from Pauri to Rishikesh. According to sources, the five persons were returning after attending the funeral rites of some relative at Arkani in Pauri when they met with the accident. As per the accounts of those present at the site of the mishap, the car’s steering getting locked seems to be the reason behind the accident.

On reaching the site of the mishap, the SDRF rescue team began the rescue work with its personnel using ropes to reach down to the site of the car wreck. From there they first retrieved the bodies of two persons from the car and brought them up to the main road where the bodies were handed over to the civil police. Efforts were underway to retrieve the bodies of the three other passengers in the evening.

According to the SDRF, the men killed in the accident have been identified as Haryana resident Ajit Singh, Rishikesh resident Sanjiv Kumar Bhandari, Pavan Singh Bhandari from Gurugram, Yogendra Singh Bhandari from Ghaziabad and Dhiraj Singh Rawat from Arkani, Pauri.