COIMBATORE: A violent clash between two groups of students of an engineering college here on Monday night has left a 21-year-old youth, P Karthikeyan of Namakkal district, brain dead.
Police said there was a long running feud on the campus between two groups of students - one belonging to mechanical and automobile engineering departments and another from computer science and civil engineering departments. On Monday, some students of the latter group were attacked by the former. This led to a revenge attack on Karthikeyan, a final year mechanical engineering student outside the college premises in the evening.
“Karthikeyan was attacked with a wooden club and he sustained severe head injuries. He was admitted to a private hospital in Gopalapuram. He remained unconscious in the ICU and late on Tuesday evening doctors declared him brain dead,” a source said.
“We initially filed a case against six students. One of the accused Sathyanarayanan studying computer science engineering lodged a counter-complaint,” Madukarai Inspector B Sivakumar told Express. In all, 14 students have been booked for rioting with deadly weapons and causing injuries. Some of them have been booked for attempted murder. While 10 have been arrested, 4 others including Karthikeyan, are in hospital.
Meanwhile, friends and family members of Karthikeyan were in a state of shock. A family member said that Karthikeyan’s father, working as a driver, has not been told about the incident. “We have only told him that his son has met with an accident. He is already worried and is expected to reach the city soon,” he said.
Karthikeyan’s friends said that the college authorities contacted them in the early hours on Tuesday and had told them about the incident. “We were able to see him only through a glass pane in the ICU where he was fitted with an oxygen mask,” one of them said.