Midnight crash near ITO leaves 2 dead, 3 critical

Got together for a reunion at a friend’s marriage ceremony in the national Capital, they never knew it would be their last ride together. In a shocking incident, two youth died while three suffered critical injuries when their Hyundai car somersaulted to the other side of the road after it hit a divider near Central Delhi’s ITO area on the intervening night of Sunday and Monday.

According to the police, the deceased have been identified as Kashish Anand and Ayushi Gulati while the injured are Manak, Shobojit and Shakun Verma. Police said they have sent the bodies for post-mortem and are waiting for the reports of the blood samples to establish whether the driver, Shobojit, was driving under the influence of alcohol.

Eyewitnesses told police that the accident took place at around 2 am in the jurisdiction of the Indraprastha Estate police station when a Hyundai i20 car, coming from Laxmi Nagar area was heading towards Connaught Place (CP). Sources, meanwhile, said that a speeding bullet came in front of the victims’ vehicle suddenly and in order to avoid getting hit, they turned towards the divider. However, their car somersaulted and went to the other side of the road.

A senior police officer said that after the accident, while the errant biker fled the spot along with his vehicle, it was only minutes later that a passer-by got down and made the PCR call. In the meantime, a team of local police reached the spot.

“The impact of the collision of the car with the divider was so severe that the car was completely decimated. Our men along with fire department officers had to use gas cutters to take out the bodies from the Hyundai i20,” said the officer. A relative of Kashish said that the group had gone to attend a wedding. 

“Kashish came to Delhi in his own Honda City car but had parked it at a parking lot in CP. So Shobojit, who was driving the Hyundai car, came to drop Kashish. Police rushed all the car occupants to LNJP hospital where Kashish and Ayushi were declared brought dead while the others who were injured were shifted by the respective families to different hospitals in the Delhi-NCR.

Sources said that all of them were B.Tech students at a private college in Chandigarh. After graduation, while Kashish shifted to Yamuna Nagar in Haryana, the others had started living in Dehradun. The cops added that a case had been registered under relevant sections of the IPC at the IP Estate police station against unknown persons.

Police further said that they are scanning the CCTV footage of the road where the accident happened to establish the exact sequence of events.