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Two Filipino engineers drowned after they went crabbing on the first day of Eid al-Adha near Al Khor, it is learnt.
The Philippine embassy and its attached agencies, the Philippine Overseas Labour Office and Overseas Workers Welfare Office (POLO-OWWA), yesterday confirmed the incident to Gulf Times.
The bodies of the victims are in the Hamad Hospital mortuary.
OWWA officer Lenny Cleofas said that the two deceased were part of a group of four Filipinos who spent Eid al-Adha holidays with friends on a beach in Al Khor. They had met in Mansoura and left for the beach around 7.20pm on Tuesday.
“It was our first time to go there,” said a member of the group who posted on Facebook a detailed account of what had happened.
They reached a beach in Al Khor around 8:30pm and immediately started crabbing. But after an hour without any catch, they went to a second location, but to no avail.
Then they went on to yet another area. However, when the waters started rising due to high tide, they four decided to go back to the shoreline.
“Only, then, we realised that we had gone too far from the shore. I estimated it to be 3km. But we had gone very far as we couldn’t see the shores anymore. It was around 11.30pm,” he said.
He heard one of the victims saying “this is already very deep” and that was the last time he heard from him. The two persons then tried calling their two other colleagues but there was no answer.
When they started shouting for help, a boat came to their rescue, pulling them out of the water using a rope. It was 2.30am. The bodies of the two drowned engineers were located nearby within a short while.
“I couldn’t bear to think that such a harmless desire to (pursue a leisure activity) would result in such a terrible tragedy,” he lamented.
Cleofas said the company for which the two engineers worked would shoulder the repatriation cost of the bodies.
