Gangtok, Nov. 23: Six school students, three of them girls, and the driver of the Mahindra Maxx they were travelling in were killed early this morning when the vehicle skidded off the road and fell 800 feet down a gorge near Tumin in East Sikkim.

The spot is 50km from Gangtok.

The three boys have been identified as Mani Bahadur Rai, 20, Sagar Gurung, 19, and Kalden Bhutia, 19. The girls are Kunzang Bhutia, 20, Diki Ongmo, 20, and Pemkit Lepcha, 18. All of them were in Class XII of Mangan Government Senior Secondary School.

The driver has been identified as Milan Pradhan.

The superintendent of police of the East district, M.S. Tuli, said the vehicle had left Mangan around 2.30am and was bound for Delo, a popular picnic spot near Kalimpong town in neighbouring West Bengal. Mangan, 60km from here, is the district headquarters of North Sikkim. The car was on the Mangan-Singtam state highway that joins NH31 — that leads to Kalimpong — at Singtam (see map).

“According to preliminary investigations, the vehicle had reached Tumin around 5am where it was refuelled at a petrol pump. The vehicle fell 2km after the pump, unable to negotiate a sharp bend. It had plummeted into the Rangchang river,” Tuli said.

The district police chief said there were several possibilities on what could have caused the accident. “One is that the driver could have been speeding and missed the turn in the darkness, or he could have gone to sleep on the wheel since they had started off in the early hours today,” Tuli said.

The Singtam police had formed teams to look for either survivors or other victims, in case there were more passengers in the vehicle. “But later the attendant of the petrol pump told us that there were three boys, an equal number of girls and the driver in the vehicle,” Tuli said.

The police said there were no witnesses to the incident. It was only after the residents of Kokoley village, across the river, heard the loud crash as the vehicle came tumbling down that they raised the alarm and informed the Singtam police station.

State health minister Hishey Lachungpa, who is also the MLA from Lachen Mangshila of which Mangan is a part, visited the accident site. The minister said the government would announce “appropriate” compensation for the next of kin of the victims tomorrow.

Sonam Denzongpa, the principal of the Mangan school, said it was the “biggest tragedy” in the history of the institution.