CHANDIGARH: At least nine people, including six women, were burnt alive and more than 15 injured when a moving bus carrying devotees from Punjab caught fire near Tauru in Haryana’s Nuh district early on Saturday, police said.
The incident occurred on the Kundli-Manesar-Palwal (KMP) Expressway around 2 am when around 60 people, all residents of Hoshiarpur and Ludhiana, were returning in the bus after visiting pilgrim towns of Ujjan and Mathura-Vrindavan, police said.
“Nine people, including six women and three men, were killed in the accident. Fifteen people were injured and have been hospitalised. All the injured are stable,” said a police official from Tauru. “The cause is yet to be ascertained. A probe is underway,” he said.
After getting information, the police and a fire brigade team reached the spot brought the fire under control, but by then eight people were burnt alive, the police official said. “The injured were rushed to the hospital. One of the injured died in the hospital,” he said.
A local eyewitness said that after seeing the bus on fire, they called out to the driver and asked him to stop. As the bus did not stop, so they chased the bus on a motorcycle and informed the driver, but by then the fire has spread in the bus.
In another incident, four students of Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law died in a car crash in Patiala when their speeding SUV met with an accident late on Friday night, police said.
“Three boys and a girl, all law students, died in the accident. The impact of the collision was so intense that police had to use tractors to pull a part of the crushed wreckage to take out the bodies,” a police official said. According to witnesses, the SUV moving in high speed went off the road and crashed into the fields nearby.