One of the injured at the hospital. (Prabin Khaling)

Gangtok/Calcutta, Oct. 20: Five tourists from Calcutta — all from the same family — were killed when the vehicle they were travelling in skidded off a mountain road and dropped 500 feet.

It fell on another stretch of the winding highway, Jawharlal Nehru Road, which links Gangtok to Nathu-la. The tourists were on their way back from Baba Mandir near Nathu-la and Changu Lake this afternoon. The accident occurred when they were 17km from Gangtok.

Six other tourists and the driver of the car suffered serious injuries and are being treated at Sir Thutob Namgyal Memorial Hospital in the Sikkim capital.

The dead have been identified as Ashis Dhar, 50, his daughter, Debparna, 22, his father, Rakhal Kumar Dhar, 80 and his in-laws Pushpa and Satyen Biswas, both 70. The Dhars were from New Barrackpore and the Biswas’ from Haltu.

Debparna, a third-year student of a private engineering college in Durgapur, died around 8.30pm at the hospital. The others had been declared brought dead.

Two other women of the same family, Ashis’s wife Deepali and her sister Sefali Mitra, did not accompany the group and had stayed back in their hotel in Gangtok. They were told about the deaths later in the evening after relatives in Calcutta were contacted. Shefali’s son Abhisek, who works for IBM, left for Sikkim after he heard of the accident.

The injured, members of another family who had jointly hired the Mahindra Maxx, are Subhas Chandra Dutta, 42, his wife Suparna, 33, and daughters, Trisha, 11, and Disha, 4, a relative Krishna Dutta and a friend Bijoy Adak.

The superintendent of police of East Sikkim, M.S. Tuli, said the accident occurred at 7th Mile while the vehicle was negotiating a turn. Dawa Tamang, the driver who is in hospital, said the brakes had failed.

Dutta, a rice trader from Madhyamgram, said the vehicle was speeding and the driver lost control while going down a hairpin bend. “My two children survived minor injuries after they were flung out of the vehicle,” Dutta said.

Sikkim tourism secretary S.B.S. Bhadauriya said senior officials had been sent to the hospital. “Our department will take the responsibility of looking after the injured and sending the bodies to Calcutta,” he said.

Wangchuk Bhutia, a senior surgeon of the hospital, said all the injured except for the children had suffered serious injuries, but were out of danger.