BHIWANDI: A 21-year-old software engineer riding a motorcycle was crushed to death under a truck after the two-wheeler rode over a pothole in Bhiwandi where work on laying the road was going on. The biker came under the heavy vehicle.
The crash, which took place on Jan 19, had initially been registered as an ‘accidental death’, but the police said they booked the truck driver for ‘negligence’, on Friday, based on their probe.
The biker, Wadala-resident Aiyaz Shemale, had gone to attend a friend’s birthday party with a few others from Mumbai, all of them on their bikes.
The motorcycle that the techie was riding went over a pothole due to which the rider lost balance, causing him and the pillion rider, Javed Ansari (22), to fall on the road, states the police complaint lodged by the biker’s friend, Adil Ansari (21), who was also among the clique of friends who attended the birthday party, and is the complainant in the case. He told TOI that tragedy struck as they were passing by Kasba Dhaba, heading towards Mumbai-Nashik highway,
As the two on the bike fell off, the techie’s leg came under the rear wheel of the truck that passed by, the police complaint states, adding that the pillion rider’s jacket got wedged under the tyre.
A friend on another bike who witnessed the crash alerted the truck driver, asking him to stop. As the truck halted, the pillion rider pulled himself out of harm’s way by ripping off his jacket that had been caught beneath a tyre.
The complainant goes on to mention that while the biker was still caught under the wheel of the truck, its “driver carelessly moved the vehicle back and forth, dragging the biker underneath over a distance of at least 4 to 5 metres”.
The injured rider was subsequently taken to Sion hospital where doctors declared him ‘dead before admission’.
As the friends scrambled to save the injured biker, they said that it did not occur to them to note down the registration number of the truck whose driver, they have alleged, fled from the spot.
An officer from Narpoli police station said that their investigation has pointed to negligence on the part of the unidentified truck driver, after which a case was registered against the driver.
The deceased man worked as a software engineer for a company in Powai.