Thousands of sea snails are dying along a beach in Bangladesh, creating a stomach-churning stench that is driving away tourists, officials said Thursday.

　　The tourism officials said the snails were washing up along a wide stretch of Cox''s Bazar beach on the Bay of Bengal.“We are baffled by the finding that only one out of more than 300 species of sea snails are dying off along a particular stretch of the natural beach,”Mohammad Zaher, a scientist with Cox''s Bazar Sea Fish Research Institute, told Reuters. The cause of the deaths was not known, he added.

　　But residents said the mass snail death could be a boon for people who make dolls and other handicraft items with the shells and sell them at high prices to tourists.

　　Cox's Bazar, 260 miles southeast of the capital Dhaka, is Bangladesh's main tourist resort but attracts only a few thousand foreign tourists each year because it is poorly maintained.