One Body Recovered, Identified As Gurpreet Singh from Punjab: Telangana Tunnel Collapse
The body has been sent to the Nagarkurnool civil hospital for post mortem and to follow other procedures.
Rescue workers on Sunday - the 16th day of the operation - pulled out the body of one of the eight missing persons from the partially collapsed SLBC tunnel in Telangana’s Nagarkurnool district after the cadaver dogs from Kerala identified the spot for presence of human remains under the rubble.
The body was retrieved from under 10 ft of silt. The body has been sent to the Nagarkurnool civil hospital for post mortem and to follow other procedures. The body could be extricated following “very careful” digging and other efforts for more than 48 hours, accoding to an official involved in the rescue mission.
Later, the decomposed body was identified as that of Gurpreet Singh, operator of the Tunnel Boring Machine (BTM) and hailing from Punjab.
The search for the remaining workers continues as it is, the official added.
Earlier, the state government deployed cadaver dogs of Kerala police to look for human presence and the rescue personnel carried out digging at the spots suggested by the canines.
Eight persons — engineers and labourers — remained trapped in the Srisailam Left Bank Canal (SLBC) project tunnel since February 22 and experts from the NDRF, Indian Army, Navy and other agencies are making relentless efforts to pull them out to safety.
The seven trapped persons are Manoj Kumar and Sri Niwas (both UP), Sunny Singh (J&K), and Sandeep Sahu, Jegta Xess, Santosh Sahu and Anuj Sahu (all from Jharkhand).
Several agencies of the state and Central governments have been making efforts for the last 15 days to trace the missing persons.
The rescue teams also reportedly spotted human parts of a person six feet under the debris on Saturday night. They were carrying out digging work around the location to pull out the body (with inputs from PTI).
