Two crushed to death as truck topples on car in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar

Two men were crushed to death inside their car after a truck, filled with rice sacks, toppled on their vehicle in south Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar in the early hours of Wednesday, the police said.

The victims, Ranjan Kalra and Ankit Malhotra, were both 35-years-old and ran an event management firm for seven years, according to the police.

The collapse was such that the police needed to employ the services of two private hydra cranes as well as three cranes of the traffic police to remove the truck, said RP Meena, deputy commissioner of police (south-east).

It took nearly 90 minutes to cut through the mangled remains of the car and pull out both the occupants.

“The two men were declared dead on arrival at a hospital,” Meena said.

The driver, 25-year-old Vipin Yadav, fled from the scene of the accident soon after the incident, but was arrested later that afternoon, and booked for causing death due to negligence.

“Yadav was on his usual trip to Tughlaqabad after picking up rice bags from Ludhiana,” an investigator involved in the matter said.

Malhotra lived with his family in east Delhi’s Karkardooma, while Kalra was a resident of Lajpat Nagar. Kalra has left behind a toddler daughter. The two were on their way to the airport when the incident took place on Wednesday.

“They had organised an event in Noida on Tuesday evening and were supposed to visit Kolkata for work, and were due to return on Thursday,” the officer said.

In the early hours of Wednesday, Malhotra drove out in his Honda City and had picked up Kalra from his Lajpat Nagar home around 3.30am. “Like they often did, they planned to leave the car at the airport’s parking lot,” the officer said.

But as they emerged from a service lane in the neighbourhood and turned on to the road under the Lajpat Nagar Flyover to head towards the airport, around 3.45am, the allegedly speeding container truck happened to come right in front of them, the officer said based on the initial probe.

“Malhotra tried to save the situation by swerving towards the right, but the truck driver couldn’t stop his vehicle and it ended up toppling over the car,” said the officer.

Since there was no way the occupants could be brought out without removing the truck, the police first sought the help of private cranes from nearby.

“When that did not help either, we sought the traffic police’s help to use their cranes to remove the truck. The car’s roof was smashed and we had to cut the car to bring out the victims,” said the investigator.

They were finally pulled out by 5.15am.

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