Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala’s woeful record of road mishaps was dented further on Saturday when five passengers of a car were killed when their car hit a Kerala State Road Transport Corporation bus near Kottarakara in the south of the state.
The accident occurred at around 1.30pm near Ayoor on the Main Central Road that connects Thiruvananthapuram and Angamaly.
The deceased included three women, a girl child and the car driver, and were identified as Smitha, Harsha, Mini, Anjana, and car driver Arun.
The occupants of the car are believed to be residents of Vadasserikara near Ranny. A male child, identified as Abhinav, has been admitted to a hospital with injuries. Some witnesses were quoted as saying that the car ran into the bus.
Kerala’s roads claim nearly 4,000 lives every year, or roughly 11 each day. Around 3.30am on Thursday, two brothers from Cherthala in Alappuzha district were killed when the bike on which they were riding was hit by an unidentified vehicle.
The brothers — Ajesh Dasan, 37 and Aneesh Dasan, 35 — were chefs, working with hotels in Kochi and Kozhikode. That mishap occurred near the Bishop Moor School at Pattanakkad on the national highway.
Police are screening camera visuals from the accident spot in order to identify the vehicle that was involved in the hit-and-run incident that took the brothers’ lives.
Police are trying to identify the vehicle that hit the brothers’ bike through footage from cameras in the vicinity of the accident spot. Early reports indicate that a heavy vehicle appears to have hit the bike, killing the siblings.
In the first eight months of last year, 2,632 people lost their lives in Kerala in as many as 25,628 road accidents.
In an accident on Friday at Perunthuruthy on the Main Central Road involving a bike and a truck, Sasidharan Nair, 67, an employee of the Pushpagiri hospital, lost his life.
