Five people, including four tourists and a local man, were killed on Sunday when a gondola car cabin crashed hundreds of meters down to the ground after its cable snapped in Gulmarg in Jammu and Kashmir.
Sources said the service has been stopped and operations are underway to rescue tourists who are stranded in 15 other cable cars.
The tree reportedly fell due to high winds. The incident is said to be the first of the kind in the Gulmarg cable car service, which started operating in 1998, and was built by the French firm Pomalgalski.
Police identified the victims as Jayant Andraskar, his wife Manshea Andraskar and their daughters Anagha and Janhvi. The family was from Shalimar Bagh in Delhi. Their guide was Mukhtar Ahmad Ganai, senior superintendent of police in Baramullah, Imtiyaz Hussain said.
The accident drew condemnation from former chief minister Omar Abdullah, who, expressing his condolences in a series of tweets, questioned why the cable car service wasn’t shut down during high winds as a precautionary measure.
The two-stage Gulmarg cable car lift ferries people to a height of 13,780 feet above the sea level. It is the world’s second highest operating cable car project with a cabin capacity of ferrying 600 people in one hour.
Gulmarg is a centre of winter sports. With one of the finest ski slopes in the world, Gulmarg drawn skiers from across the world through the winter. In winter the cable car also ferries a number of skiers.
