In a horrifying incident, a lorry mowed down three students aged between 18 and 20 years in Andhra Pradesh's Visakhapatnam district near Dharmavaram village. The incident took place on Tuesday morning and the police said that the students, who were triple riding, were travelling from Yelamanchili to Dharmavaram and were taking a U turn on the highway, when the speeding lorry travelling from Tuni to Visakhapatnam hit them.
The police said that the impact was such that the motorbike and the students were dragged along with the lorry, with one of the students being dragged a total of 3 km along with the bike before the Highway Patrol police who had been notified by locals about the incident, managed to stop the lorry. The deceased have been identified as Naveen, Karthik and Sai and their bodies were sent for a post-mortem.
While some police officials stated that the lorry driver kept going as he feared an attack by locals, others suggested that he was allegedly inebriated and may not have noticed that he was dragging the motor bike over the noise that his vehicle made. Some media reports stated that when the police conducted a breathalyser test, the driver registered a reading of 250 mg/100 ml against the acceptable legal limit of 30 mg/100 ml.
A case has been booked against the accused for negligent and rash driving and he has been taken into custody for questioning.
Last month, the body of a man from Tamil Nadu’s Thiruvallur, who met with a fatal accident near his house, was found 420 kilometres away in Andhra Pradesh. Sudhakar, who was riding a bike was hit by a car at Pandur in Thiruvallur district and the biker’s body was found in Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh the next day.
According to news reports at the time, the accident happened when Sudhakar, was returning home after his work and a speeding car rammed into his bike near Pandur, severing Sudhakar’s leg and throwing him off the bike. While the driver of the car fled the scene after hitting the bike, the impact of the crash threw Sudhakar’s body onto the cargo hold of a truck that was passing by. The driver, unaware of the accident, continued to drive on with the body and realised what had happened only once he reached his destination.