4 engg grads & friend die as car rams truck

4 engg grads & friend die as car rams truck

Sindhu.Kannan@timesgroup.com

Chennai: 06.09.2021

Four engineering graduates, who came to the city to take part in a campus recruitment drive, and their friend lost their lives after their car rammed a parked truck on GST road early on Sunday. The accident occurred at Perungalathur near Chennai.

The victims were identified as Raja Ganesh, 21, of Trichy, Naveen, 21, of Mettur, Ajay, 21, of Trichy, Rahul, 20, of Pudukottai, and Arvind Shankar of Chennai. Except Navin, who was driving the car, the others were engineering graduates of Hindustan University. They had come to the city on Friday to take part in the campus interview scheduled for Monday.

On Friday, they went to their college and got their course completion certificates. They were staying at their friend’s room in Kelambakkam and had visited a few places in Chennai on Saturday. They decided to go for a drive towards Perungalathur and return to their room when the accident took place.

MANGLED: The five bodies were retrieved after an hour-long operation and sent to Tambaram GH for postmortem

Truck laden with iron rods was parked at the spot for 2 days

Police checked the CCTV camera footage from the accident spot and found that around 1.30am, Naveen lost control of the car while trying to overtake a truck. The car hit another vehicle and then rammed a trailer lorry laden with iron rods parked on the roadside.

The bodies were recovered by fire and rescue services personnel after an hour-long operation and sent to the Tambaram GH in Chromepet for postmortem. The car was completely mangled and they had to pull out the bodies from underneath the truck.

Some motorists said such illegal parking of trucks on roadside was posing a risk to other road users. Officials had failed to act against the truck that had remained parked at the spot for more than two days. The deaths could have been averted if the truck was removed from the spot, they said. Relatives and friends of the victims were inconsolable on seeing the bodies of the victims at the mortuary. The Chrompet traffic investigation police have registered a case of rash driving.