A four-month-old baby, his mother and aunt were killed in a landslip on the New Tehri National Highway at Chamba in Uttarakhand on August 21.
The victims were identified as Poonam Khanduri, her four-month-old son and her sister-in-law Saraswati Devi.
Suman Khanduri, the father of the child, had gone to a market nearby to buy food while his wife, son and sister-in-law waited in the car that was parked in a taxi-stand hit by the landslip.
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The police and State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) started the rescue operation immediately. But after two hours of digging through the rubble, it was found that the three had died.
Tehri Senior Superintendent of Police Navneet Singh Bhullar said the bodies were recovered from the car buried under the rubble.
“Some more vehicles could also be trapped as the landslip hit the taxi-stand near the Chamba police station,” he said, adding that a search-and-rescue operation was underway. Reports that came in later in the day said the police had also recovered the body of a 30-year-old man but the victim is yet to be identified.
Meanwhile, all schools in Bhilangana, Chamba, Narendra Nagar and Jaunpur in Tehri district have been declared closed on Tuesday on the orders of the District Magistrate in view of a heavy rain alert for various parts of the State over the next two days.
(With PTI inputs)
