A day after a deputy secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance was killed in a road accident in the Delhi Cantonment area, the Delhi Police on Monday arrested Gaganpreet Kaur (38), the accused driver of the car involved in the accident from a hospital. According to sources in the police, the hospital belongs to the family of the accused.
The police have registered a case of culpable homicide in the matter under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections 281 (rash driving or riding on a public way), 125B (acts endangering life or personal safety of others), 105 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 238 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence, or giving false information to screen offender). A Delhi court on Monday sent the accused to two-day judicial custody.
Navjot Singh (52), a resident of Hari Nagar working as a deputy secretary with the Union finance ministry, was killed in the accident on Sunday afternoon while his wife, who was in the pillion, sustained serious injuries. Singh’s son said his parents were returning from Bangla Sahib Gurdwara and had stopped at Karnataka Bhawan for eating. “Instead of taking them to a nearby hospital, they were taken (to a hospital) nearly 22 km from the accident site,” he said. BMW driver nabbed from family hospital The son also claimed that his mother was made to sit in the lobby at the hospital despite her serious condition, while the husband of the BMW driver, Parikshit Makkar (40), who suffered minor injuries, was immediately admitted.
In her complaint to the police, Sandeep Kaur said that she kept requesting Gaganpreet to take them to the nearest hospital, but she did not.
A van driver, Gulfam, had rushed all four injured people to the hospital in Azadpur from the Dhaula Kuan accident site said that without waiting for the ambulance, he took the victims to a hospital in Azadpur in his van. When they reached there, doctors were present at the hospital and Navjot was declared dead in 20 to 25 minutes. “Many bystanders were recording videos of the accident site immediately after it happened, but did not help. I was driving a loading vehicle, stopped and rushed the injured to a hospital in Azadpur after the man and the woman in the car asked me to take them there,” Gulfam said
The luxury car and the two-wheeler involved in the collision have been seized, and forensic examination of the accident site has been conducted, the police added.
Singh’s wife, in her complaint to the police, had said, “After the accident, we were rushed to a hospital in a van-type vehicle. The couple who were accused of hitting us (motorcycle) asked the van driver repeatedly to take us to GTB Nagar. I was requesting him to take us to a nearby hospital.”