The Salem Rural Police are investigating whether negligence on the part of the trainers led to the death of 26-year-old Bangalore resident V. Ramya while skydiving here on Thursday. Police teams have fanned out to different areas in the State to question nine other participants of the event to ascertain whether training and safety measures were adequate.
“This has been initiated after a preliminary inquiry revealed that the trainers were careless and negligent about the safety of divers,” Superintendent of Police R. Sakthivel told The Hindu on Friday.
After preliminary inquiry with the two trainers — B. Aishwarya Yadav (33) and G. Mohan Rao (38) — who dove from the aircraft along with Ramya, the SP said “They claim that she got confused and was unable to open the parachute and that one of them pulled the parachute open. The parachute spun around her and resulted in her crashing to the ground,” he added.
“The divers moved away from her, instead of helping her cut down the parachute and open the second parachute. Staff and officials in the airport said the organisers did not have a proper ground team to assist the divers. This is in addition to the unavailability of medical assistance,” Mr. Sakthivel said.
Mr. Sakthivel said all three trainers picked up for inquiry, who were subsequently arrested on Friday, gave contradicting statements.
After post-mortem was done on Ramya’s body at the Government Medical College and Super Specialty Hospital here on Friday, it was handed over to her relatives who then cremated it at the Salem Corporation’s crematorium.
