COIMBATORE: Five college students, including two brothers, who went on a bike trip to Valparai from Coimbatore along with five other friends, drowned in a river on Friday evening. According to sources, the incident happened at Nallakathu on Mudis Road near Valparai town around 5 PM. Rescue teams retrieved the bodies from the river after nearly an hour.
The deceased were identified as R Ajay (20), R Vinith (22) and his younger brother R Dhanush (20), S Noufal Arsath (20) and Sarathkumar (20). While Noufal was from GM Nagar in Ukkadam in Coimbatore city, others were from Manikandapuram village near Kinathukadavu on the outskirts of Coimbatore city.
Sarath and Noufal were engineering students and Vinith had just completed MSc biotechnology. The other two were studying biotechnology in a private college in the same locality, police said.
Five went into middle of the river, say cops
On Friday morning, the 10 friends had left for Valparai for a one-day trip in five bikes. They reached Valparai around noon. After having lunch, five of them went to Nallakathu to take a dip in the Koolangal River, a water source for the Solayar Dam. Quite often, water current in the river suddenly turns strong, and they could have got trapped in a strong current and drowned, a police officer said.
The place they visited usually does not have crowds as it is located amid private tea estates and is situated down a slope from the road level, sources said. While taking a bath, the five allegedly went into the middle of the river where the current was strong and they were washed away by the river.
Within seconds all the five drowned and efforts to save them by some onlookers went in vain, police said. Police and fire safety personnel retrieved the bodies a few meters away from the spot around 6 pm and the bodies were shifted to Valparai Government Hospital for postmortem.
“We have been constantly warning tourists visiting Valparai to avoid venturing into water bodies in isolated places. But newcomers impressed by the scenery dive into rivers without understanding the danger,” a police officer from the Valparai subdivision said.