In a car collision in Kerala's Thrissur, eight individuals believed to be students from Tamil Nadu were killed, local police informed PTI on Saturday. The tragic road accident happened on Friday around 11.40 pm when the vehicle the youths were travelling in collided with the rear end of a parked lorry on the highway at Panambikkunnu in Kaipamangalam. The lorry number was registered in Maharashtra.
8 dead as car rams into parked lorry
Keralam police in a statement said, “Eight people were killed after a car rammed into the rear of a parked goods lorry on the National Highway at Kaipamangalam in Thrissur district. The accident occurred around midnight at Panambikunnu Centre. The car was completely mangled in the impact, and the occupants had to be extricated by cutting open the vehicle. Preliminary information suggests that those travelling in the car were students of an engineering college in Dindigul, Tamil Nadu,” ANI reported.
Although locals, fire and rescue personnel and police rushed to the spot to rescue the passengers but six of them died on the spot. The impact of the crash left the car severely mangled due to which rescue teams had to cut open the wreckage to recover their bodies.
Two of the injured who survived the impact were taken to a nearby hospital but later succumbed to injuries and were declared dead on arrival, police informed PTI.
Their bodies were pulled out of the car, which was registered in Tamil Nadu, and were taken to the mortuary of Thrissur Medical College for postmortem. The car was reportedly heading towards Kodungallur from the Guruvayur. The police suspects that the deceased were students from Tamil Nadu.
As per media reports, the victims were engineering students from Dindigul’s PSNA College.
The FIR suggested that the Maharashtra-registered lorry was parked illegally on the right side of on an under-construction stretch of NH-66. This section was barricaded and traffic had been diverted. According to the police, the car was travelling at high speed. The fatal accident occurred because its driver apparently failed to notice the diversion barricade and rammed into the rear of the lorry.
Kaipamangalam police registered a case against the lorry driver and six of the deceased have been identified. Four of the occupants were from Dindigul — Surya, Yuvasanjith, Vishva and Johua — while two others were from Madurai — Santhosh and Prasanna. The identity of the other two has not been established yet. Identity cards recovered from the bodies were used to identify the deceased. Charges under Section 105 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita have been levied against the lorry driver for culpable homicide.
