UK tourist in Meghalaya drowns in Umkynsan river

Meghalaya police on Wednesday handed over the body of 25-year-old Christina Reed, a tourist in India from the United Kingdom, to her father Scot Robert Reed. Reed was swept away while she was swimming in Umkynsan River at Sohra (Cherrapunjee) along with her two companions on Saturday.

Her body could be recovered from the hilly stream only on Tuesday by a rescue team comprising divers of Meghalaya fire service and locals after a three-day search operation, which was crippled by inclement weather and poor visibility.

Christina Reed was staying in Cherrapunjee holiday resort in Sohra with two other foreign tourists -- her boyfriend Anthony Biddle, 28, and Maxime St Pierre Ostrander, 20. Her body was located about 1.5 kilometers away from where she had been swept away, police said.

The body was brought to Shillong Civil Hospital for post-mortem. Sohra or Cherrapunjee is known as the wettest place on the earth because of the huge volume of rainfall the place receives per year.

The Meghalaya Tourism Development Forum, a banner organization of tour operators o the hill state, has appealed to all tour operators to accord top priority to the safety and wellbeing of tourists and to put into practice a set of Do's and Don'ts for all tourists visiting the state, so that such an incident does not occur in future.

Locals said it was for the first time that a foreign tourist had died in Sohra.