Mathura fog tragedy: Mother who saved 2 kids missing

With her bus on fire, Parvati’s motherly instinct told her to dangle her two children out of a broken window to save their lives first, even if it meant catching a shard of glass in her neck and collapsing bleeding.

Her brother-in-law, Gulzari, is still looking for her at hospitals, where mangled remains of the deceased streamed in in ambulances, thrust in black polybags.

Visibility was not even one metre due to dense fog at the 127th milestone on the Agra-to-Noida side of the Yamuna Expressway in the early hours of Tuesday, when a pile-up involving eight buses and three smaller vehicles claimed at least 13 lives, a senior police officer said.

The pile-up of the vehicles had sparked an inferno.

Gulzari, who spoke to reporters outside a Mathura facility where post-mortem examinations are conducted, said he had a telephonic conversation with Parvati after the accident and she told him that she helped her children — Prachi and Sunny —get out of the bus. Parvati (42) is yet to be traced. Police said all 13 deceased died of burns and it was hard to identify most of the bodies, which were collected in charred remnants.

“A call was made to police at 4.02 am and a Police Response Vehicle reached the spot at 4.08 am. A second PRV reached the spot nine minutes (at 4.11 am) after the call was received. A third PRV reached the spot 13 minutes after the call,” Senior Superintendent of Police, Mathura, Shlok Kumar, who visited the accident site, said.

He said at first, there was a collision between a vehicle and a bus, followed by a number of buses ramming into vehicles. The vehicles that were behind tried to change lanes but the occupants of the first vehicle were out on the road by then and while attempting to avoid hitting them, there was another collision, the officer added.

“This was a two-layered accident. Visibility was not even one metre. Even when I reached the accident site, nothing was visible,” Kumar said. He added that the biological remains will be matched with the DNA samples of those looking for their kin. District Magistrate Chandra Prakash Singh said arrangements are being made for the last rites of those whose bodies have been identified.

Locals said the sound of the collision travelled up to villages kilometres away, breaking the morning calm on a crashing note. Dense fog made the rescue job difficult and lent little to no visibility to the responders. Charred, mangled shells of buses and vehicles stood witness to the tragedy, as the rescuers went about pulling out bodies, or whatever was left of those.