Two dead after speeding bus overturns in Karol Bagh
One was getting ready for his wedding a month away. The other went to celebrate Eid, leaving behind his pregnant wife. On Wednesday, the stories of hope met a tragic end when a speeding bus overturned near Hanuman Mandir in Karol Bagh, killing the two men returning home from Jaipur.
Mahesh, 22, worked as a logistics worker and was one of the two who died in the post-midnight crash. The other was 30-year-old Shehbaj Alam, who was returning from Jaipur with his cousin after celebrating Eid. Alam left behind a three-month pregnant wife back home in Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor.
In the intervening night of Tuesday and Wednesday, a Delhi-bound tourist bus coming from Jaipur, allegedly being driven at a speed of around 100 km/h, went out of control at a roundabout near the temple and flipped two to three times in the air, police said.
Besides the two, the accident left 23 more injured — 13 of them in a semi-critical state. “Maiya intezar kar rahi thi, beta subah aajayega (Mother was waiting for my son to come in the morning),” Mahesh’s mother said, breaking down as she spoke about her youngest son.
The Bareilly native had boarded the bus with his 30-year-old brother Mukesh in Haryana’s Bilaspur, where they both worked. Blood stains on Mukesh’s clothes testified to the horror of the crash.
“Despite our asking the driver several times to slow down, he did not. He was also drunk. Around 11.30 pm, he stopped the bus near an eatery, asking us to freshen up and eat. The bus halted for nearly half an hour,” Mukesh said.
He claimed that the halt eventually stretched to about an hour, a period during which the driver got drunk. The bus had no functional emergency exit, he also claimed. “My brother was trapped under the bus with many others. There was a woman whose legs were visible while the rest of her body was pinned underneath. I tried to pull people out and then took my brother to the hospital in an ambulance,” Mukesh, who managed to crawl out of the mangled vehicle, said.
The police denied the claim that the driver was drunk, citing his medico-legal report. An officer said that while the bus did have an emergency exit, its doors jammed after the accident. A mechanical inspection of the vehicle will be conducted to ascertain any technical faults, he added.
