Kollam: Four people cleaning and deepening a well died of asphyxiation, police here said on Thursday.

An official of the Fire and Rescue Department trying to rescue the victims fell unconscious due to the asphyxiation but was saved, they said.

Narrating the sequence of the incident to PTI, the police said, "One of the five got into the well to clean it and got suffocated. Seeing this, the three others went in and met with the same fate. All of them died in the well."

The names of the deceased were Somarajan (56), Rajan (36), Manoj (34) and Sivaprasad (25), they said.