Crash victim was to meet family for Christmas

Abu Dhabi: A family of three children and mother flew in on Wednesday night to celebrate Christmas with their father, an Abu Dhabi resident, but their patience ran out when he did not turn up at the airport even until Thursday afternoon.

"The wife and children did not know that he had been killed in a road accident on the way to receive them on Wednesday night," said a colleague of Varghese, an Indian who suffered the fatal accident.

The family did not have the contact number of anybody else so they had no option but to wait at the airport until the next afternoon, said Mohammad Ashraf, the colleague.

"His children are small… the oldest may be around 10," he said.

Mechanical problem

"On the way to Dubai Airport, Varghese had to stop the car on the [side of the] road due to some mechanical problem and it was said that another vehicle hit him," Ashraf said.

Dubai Police contacted his company in Abu Dhabi on Thursday [after finding identification documents in the car]. Colleagues later came to Dubai and identified the body, Ashraf said.

Varghese was around 50 and worked as a supervisor at a printing press in Abu Dhabi, Ashraf said.

He originally hailed from Changanassery in Kottayam district in Kerala but his family had settled in Bangalore, Karnataka, he said.

"One of our colleagues went to the airport and struggled hard not to break the sad news to the family," he said.

He said the colleague somehow convinced them to go back to India on the pretext that Varghese would join them soon back home. "I heard that they came to know the tragic news after reaching India," he said.

Varghese was a gentleman and very popular among the colleagues, Ashraf said.

"Everybody liked him."

He joined the company around one year ago. Earlier he was working in another Gulf country, the colleague said.

The victim's family could not be reached on Saturday.