People gather on the bank of the Chinsurah pond where the boy drowned. (Ananda Das)

Chinsurah, June 7: A 16-year-old Don Bosco School student in Hooghly who scored 96 per cent in the ICSE this year drowned in a pond today when he slipped into a crater while washing his feet after playing football with friends.

“Soham Bhattacharjee and his three classmates were hurling sandals at each other while washing their feet. One of them hurled his sandal a little deep into the water. Soham, who did not know swimming, jumped to retrieve it but fell into a hole in the pond created by excavation of silt. His friends could not save him because they too did not know swimming,” a police officer said.

Kamal Hasan, a local resident, said Soham’s friends extended one end of a coconut tree leaf towards him so that he could hold it and they could pull him back. “But the leaf was just out of his reach and he drowned.”

The friends informed Chinsurah police. A police team along with local fishermen arrived at the ghat and fished out Soham’s body. His three friends were interrogated later.

The police informed Soham’s mother, a lecturer at the Itachunan Bijoynarayan College in nearby Pandua, about the tragedy.