GONDIA: Three passengers were killed when a private bus coming from Chhattisgarh collided with a stationary truck near a village in Gondia district of Maharashtra, police said on Friday.
Eight passengers of the Chhattisgarh-registered bus were critically injured in the accident which took place on National Highway-53 near Dhobisarad village under Deori tehsil shortly after midnight on Thursday, they said.
The bus, belonging to a private travel agency, was going from Kawardha in Chhattisgarh to Chandrapur in Maharashtra.
As the bus was passing through Deori at 12.20 am, the driver was unable to notice a truck parked on the roadside due to darkness and rammed into it, according to police.
The impact of the collision was such that the front portion of the bus was completely damaged.
There were 45 passengers in the bus and three of them perished in the crash.
Two of them were identified as Sunita Hemlal Baghele (45), a resident of Khairagarh in Chhattisgarh, and Manoj Bablu Patle (40), a native Kawardha, while police did not provide details about the third deceased.
The critically injured passengers were referred to Nagpur for advanced treatment, said police.
On getting information about the crash, a police team led by Inspector Pravin Dange reached the spot and helped the injured come out of the bus with assistance from local residents.
Ambulances from nearby Primary Health Centres and Rural Hospitals were summoned and used to ferry the injured passengers to hospitals.
According to Assistant Police Inspector Mukesh Rathod, the truck got stranded on the roadside after running out of fuel.
Bus driver Chandrashekhar Chaudhari failed to notice the truck and this led to the ghastly accident.
The bus driver also got injured and both his legs were fractured in the crash, Rathod added.