KATHMANDU: Eight tourists from Kerala including four children who were holidaying in the Himalayan country Nepal were found dead, possibly due to a gas leak, in their resort room.
The incident occurred in Everest Panorama resort located in Daman, Thaha Municipality of Makawanpur district, in Nepal, on Monday night.
The deceased have been identified as Prabhin Kumar Nair, 39, Sharanya, 34, Renjith Kumar T B, 39, Indu Renjith, 34, and their children Sreebhadra, 9, Abhinav Soorya, 9, Abhi Nair, 7, and Vaishnav Renjith, 2.
While the family of Prabhin belongs to Chenkottukonam near Chempazhanthi in Thiruvananthapuram, Renjith and his family hail from Kunnamangalam in Kozhikode. Among the dead are two men, two women, two girls and two boys. There were around 15 members in the touring team.
According to reports, the victims reportedly used the room heater to keep themselves warm in the resort and they were found unconscious in the locked suite inside the resort in the morning. The police suspect that they died of asphyxiation after inhaling the gas from the gas heater used for warming themselves in the room at night. Nepal witnesses cold wave condition between December and January.
Although they had booked a total of four rooms, eight of them stayed in a room and remaining others in another room, the manager said. The eight were found lying in an unconscious state after the hotels' staff opened the room on Tuesday morning using duplicate keys since they failed to answer the doorbells.
The hotel management arranged to airlift them to HAMS Hospital in Dhumbarahi Kathmandu, where they were declared dead-on-arrival. Since the mercury was very low, all the windows and the door were bolted from inside. Police have also confirmed that in their preliminary assumption is that the tourists might have died due to suffocation caused by lack of ventilation.
Meanwhile, the Indian Embassy officials have reached the hospital where the bodies of the victim were kept for postmortem.
"Deeply distressed by the tragic news of the passing away of eight Indian tourists in Nepal," External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar tweeted.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has directed the Norka authorities to bring back the bodies of the victim to Kerala after coordinating with embassy officials in Nepal. The bodies are expected to reach their natives by Wednesday.
The CM also expressed deep grief in the tragedy. State Tourism Minister Kadkampally Surendran has also contacted Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan to speed up the process of bringing back the bodies to Kerala.