8 from Kerala found dead in Nepal hotel

Eight tourists from Kerala — two couples and four children — were found unconscious in their room at a popular mountain resort in Daman,

Nepal

, on Tuesday and were subsequently declared brought dead when taken to a hospital in Kathmandu by an air ambulance. Preliminary reports indicated that the cause of death was a gas leak from a heater in their room.

The dead were identified as Praveen Krishnan Nair, Saranya Sasi, Sreebhadra Praveen, Aarcha Praveen, Abhinav Saranya Nair, Ranjith Kumar, Indu Lakshmi and Vyshnav Ranjith. They were part of a group of 15 people — families of four men who were engineering college classmates 16 years ago — travelling from Kerala to Pokhara, a popular tourist destination.

They were on their way back home and stayed at Everest Panorama Resort in Daman, in Nepal’s Makawanpur district, on Monday night. According to the resort manager, although the group had booked four rooms, eight of them slept in one room and the remaining in another. All the windows and the door of the room were bolted from inside, the manager said.

Mohammed Iqbal, a classmate of Ranjith and Praveen, said it was a long-awaited reunion trip of the four close friends. He said though the classmates had gone on many trips together, this was the first time they had taken their families along.

Praveen, from Chempazhanthi in Thiruvananthapuram, worked as an engineer in

Dubai

while his wife, Sharanya, was an MPharm student and lived in

Kochi

with their three children. Ranjit worked in an IT firm in Thiruvananthapuram and his wife Indu was an accountant in a cooperative bank in Kozhikode. The couple’s elder son, Madhav, survived as he had spent the night in another room.

The eight of them were airlifted to HAMS hospital in Kathmandu where they were pronounced dead on arrival, superintendent of police Sushil Singh Rathaur said. “A doctor from the Indian mission was also immediately sent to the hospital concerned to check on the welfare of the patients and to provide necessary assistance,” a source at the Indian embassy in Kathmandu told PTI. “We have now been informed that all eight patients did not survive,” the source added.

The Kerala government said it would take all steps to ensure that the bodies of the eight were brought to the state as early as possible. Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan expressed “deep grief” over the incident and directed NORKA (non-resident Keralite affairs) officials to coordinate with the Indian embassy in Nepal. The bodies are expected to be brought to the state on Wednesday after post-mortem, a statement from the CM’s office said. Vijayan also wrote a letter to foreign minister S Jaishankar seeking his intervention for the rendering of all possible assistance to the families and friends of the dead.

Junior foreign minister V Muraleedharan said Indian embassy officials in Kathmandu were taking steps to bring the bodies back to India as early as possible. “We are in regular touch with the Indian embassy in Kathmandu,” he said.