The body of one more student, who drowned in the Murud beach tragedy on Monday, was retrieved Tuesday morning, taking the toll to 14.
A team of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel and the Coast Guard spotted the body at around 9 a.m. The body of Saif Ahmed, who was unaccounted for after the tragedy, was finally spotted after a massive search operation that lasted over 19 hours.
The police said that ambulances bearing the bodies of the deceased students, 10 girls and four boys, who were studying Computer Science at the city-based Abeda Inamdar College, would reach Pune in the afternoon.
A group of around 130 persons, including 115 students and more than 10 teachers and staffers had set out for a college-sponsored picnic on Monday morning near Murud beach in Raigad district on Monday, 160 km from here.
Tragedy struck when a group of around 20 students entered the waters and having failed to anticipate the sudden low tide, were swept away by the sea.
Five girls, who were part of the group who entered the waters, were luckily rescued owing to the joint efforts of the coast guards and the locals.
Meanwhile in Pune, the Abeda Inamdar college campus witnessed tense scenes on Monday night with fraught parents and relatives of the students angrily questioning the authorities on how the group could venture into the sea despite the presence of teachers in the picnic.
The Pune cantonment police were eventually called in to shelter P.A. Inamdar, President, of the Maharashtra Cosmopolitan Education Society which runs the college, from the frayed tempers of the anxious guardians.
Despite insistent warnings from locals and general signs dissuading tourists and picnickers from venturing into the treacherous waters, the current tragedy has a precedent when in 2014, six Chembur-based residents from Mumbai, drowned after trying to swim in an inebriated condition.
