Seventeen labourers, most of them from Jharkhand and Bihar, were killed Tuesday when their vehicle skidded off an icy road and rolled down a 200-ft-deep gorge in Himachal Pradesh's Kinnaur district, police said.

While the 17 -- who worked for the General Engineering Reserve Force (GREF), a wing of the Border Roads Organisation that maintains the highway passing through rugged Himalayan ranges -- died on the spot, two others were admitted to a nearby hospital, said Superintendent of Police Veena Bharti.