The fire brigade divers recovered the bodies of the two missing young people after diving into the Brenta river, in San Martino di Lupari in the Padua area.
At 10.40pm yesterday the first body was found, that of the 30-year-old Romanian who had dived in vain to save the 23-year-old Sri Lankan who was in difficulty due to the current. The body lay 4 meters below the surface, slightly upstream from where witnesses had seen it disappear.
This morning the rescue operations resumed in the area of the first discovery, where the current is particularly intense. This is because, the police explain, at that point - also due to a hydraulic barrier further upstream - a kind of basin appears which tends to make the current flow backwards. At 11.25am the second victim was recovered. In addition to the divers, the Drago 154 helicopter and the Sapr unit for searches from above, the Tas personnel (Topography applied to rescue), the Hidra river boat equipped with an echo sounder, operators of the Alpine River Speleo unit, operated on site. and of the Cittadella detachment (Padua).
According to what has been reconstructed, the two boys were playing football on a small beach along the river when the ball ended up in the water, the witnesses say. One of them would have dived to recover the ball and would have disappeared into the water, the second would have jumped in to save him but within a very short time he too was dragged by the current, which was quite strong at that point.
(Unioneonline/D)
