Nine members of a family, including three children, died after a truck collided head on with their vehicle on National Highway 33 in the wee hours of Saturday. The family residing in Dhurwa locality of the Capital city was returning from Arrah in Bihar after ceremonial head shaving of a four-year-old boy, who is one of the deceased.
Eyewitnesses said that the Innova lost its track and went on the wrong side of the Patna-Ranchi highway and rammed into a truck coming from the opposite direction at around 4 am. All the passengers in the Innova died on the spot while the truck driver fled.
According to local police, five men, two women and three children died in the accident. The deceased have been identified as Satyanarayan Singh (73), Ajit Kumar Singh (28), Mantu Kumar Singh (32), Saroj Singh (30), Subodh Kumar Singh (30), Rinku Singh (28), Kali Kumari (13), Raunak Kumar (4), Ruhi Kumari (7) and car driver Anchal Pandey (33). Their bodies were sent to Ranchi after autopsy at Sadar Hospital in Ranchi.
“The truck driver is absconding. All the bodies have been sent to Hatia. We are waiting for the postmortem reports,” said Ramgarh Superintendent of Police Nidhi Dwivedi.
The speeding Innova, sources said, got stuck in the truck’s engine space due to the high intensity collision. Eyewitnesses said that it took at least four hours to remove the bodies from the debris.
The family left Arrah on Friday night and the driver may have been awake the entire night, police said.
Usually, drivers who cover long distances in the night do not get proper sleep and are more susceptible to loss of concentration and drowsiness before dawn. In this case, he had already covered around 300 kilometers of distance before the accident.
Police said no traces of alcohol were found in the body of the driver. However, the autopsy report will give a clearer picture on it.