MANSEHRA: Three people drowned on Friday when an indigenously made chairlift fell into the Indus River in the Barseen area of Upper Kohistan on Friday.

The government had barred chairlift operations in mountainous parts of the Hazara division following Battagram incident last year when eight students had remained stranded the entire day in a dangling broken facility, but the ban was recently lifted.

On Friday, Naseeb Khan, 28, Mohammad Sher, 36, and Fidaur Rehman, 18, were crossing the river in a chairlift, locally known as Doli, when one of its two pillars uprooted and fell into the water in the Barseen area.

“Police and our teams are taking part in rescue operation, but flooding water in the river has been hampering our efforts to fish out the bodies,” Abdul Rehman, an official of Rescue 1122 told reporters.

According to witnesses, the body of one of them got stuck in the chairlift when it fell into the river, while the other two were washed away. “The third body was also swept away by torrents when rescuers attempted to pull the chairlift out of the water through shovel machine,” the Rescue 1122 official said.

DSP Sajjad Khan, who led the operation, told reporters despite moving the shovel machine to the riverbed they couldn’t drag the chairlift out of the water. “We need modern machines to carry out rescue and recovery operations to fish out bodies from the Indus River here,” he said.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2024