Karnataka bus fire victims identified

All the seven victims of the bus fire at Haveri in Karnataka on Thursday have been identified, police said here on Friday. 

‘The victims have been identified with the help of their kin and the passengers’ list from the bus operator,’ Haveri superintendent of police M Shashi Kumar told a news agency. 

The ill-fated private-run luxury bus burst into flames after it rammed into the railing of a bridge on National Highway (NH4) in the early hours at a village near Haveri, about 330 km from here.  Of the seven victims, five, including a couple and their three children, were a family from Mumbai. 

The couple was Kalim Khan, 40, Sameera Banu, 32, and their three children Aman, Numan and Kaif. 

‘The Khan family was on a return journey to Mumbai after a holiday trip to Bangalore. They were seated in the rear portion of the bus and burnt to death in the fire,’ Kumar recalled. 

The other two victims were Hemanth Kumar from Surat in Gujarat and Niyaz, one of the two bus drivers, from Bangalore. The victims’ bodies are kept at the state-run KIMS Hospital in Hubli, about 410 km from here, for autopsy and DNA test to ascertain their gender and relationship with kin.