Search operation ends; 5 bodies retrieved from Tungabhadra river near Mantralayam

Tirupati: Mantralayam police along with the state disaster response force personnel retrieved the bodies of five victims from the Tungabhadra river near Mantralayam on Sunday.

A family reunion for a religious ritual at Mantralayam had turned tragic for friends and relatives who turned up as five among them were washed away in the Tungabhadra river when they went for a leisure swim on Saturday. Though the Mantralayam police and the SDRF teams launched a rescue operation on Saturday itself, their efforts did not materialise, and bodies of the five victims were retrieved on Sunday. The victims of the Tungabhadra tragedy were identified as Satish (35), his son Yuvan Chandra (5), Dhanu (23), Sandhya (22) and Raghavendra (25).

Mantralayam MRO Rama Devi and CI Dasthagiri, who coordinated the rescue operations since Saturday, shifted the retrieved bodies of the victims for postmortem on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the Mantralayam police who were in the midst of tracing out the five victims of the Tungabhadra tragedy during the rescue operation reinitiated on Sunday, stumbled upon the body of a 70-year-old man from Karnataka, who was identified as DH Yalakki Gowda, a native of Doddamodur village in Hasan district in Karnataka. The body of the 70-year-old was also shifted for postmortem as well. The local police have passed on information about the development to their Karnataka counterparts as well as Yalakki Gowda’s family members.