GUWAHATI: A divers’ team of Indian Navy searched more than three kilometres of Dikhow river in Sivasagar district with sophisticated sonar equipment for nearly 12 hours on Tuesday but could not locate the vehicle that had drowned with five passengers trapped inside on Saturday evening.The 10-member naval team from Visakhapatnam-based Eastern Naval Command along with associated diving equipment was airlifted by an AN32 aircraft to the state on Monday to join the search operation.District deputy commissioner Pallav Gopal Jha said that the search operation by the navy divers will resume on Wednesday at daybreak.“We intend to resume the search at about 5.30 am tomorrow. The navy team mapped the river up to three and a half kilometres. Some signals were picked up at four to five places and the divers went down but it wasn’t the vehicle that had drowned. We hope to make a breakthrough tomorrow,” Jha said.The naval team used the side-scan sonar, which is used commonly to detect debris items and other obstructions on the seafloor. It creates an image of large areas of the sea floor or, in this case, the river bed.Head of the divers’ team N Singh said, “” The equipment we are using is to map the bottom of the river and when we get an image of an object, we make the dive. So far we have not found the vehicle. We were told that the when the car drowned on Saturday, there was a lot of current in the river…probably the vehicle must have been swept further downstream. The water level has come down considerably and the current is also less. We will resume the search tomorrow.”Besides the naval team, three teams from the NDRF, six teams from the SDRF and a team from the para-commando of the Army have also been pressed into the search operation.Guwahati-based businessman Haren Bora was on his way to the family’s native village with his mother Panou Bora, wife Phunu and daughters Chimpi and Munmi. His car veered off the embankment road and fell into the river at the Dichial village on Saturday evening. Locals saw the car fall into the river and swept away by the strong currents. A rescue operation was launched the same day but did not yield any results. --pk

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