A 45-year-old man saved his five month-old baby by the throwing it out of the window from a sleeper coach which was on fire on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway. He threw the baby boy into the arms of the locals who were rushing to help the passengers.
The man, identified as Dinesh, also made it out of the bus with burn injuries, however, his wife — Maya — could not make it.
In a shaken and traumatised condition, Dinesh on Thursday said “I didn’t know how else to save him.” Amid this chaos, his younger daughter was wrongly tagged as deceased in the incident. She was identified as the second person to have died other than Maya, a Times of India report.
When Dinesh was called for identification of his younger daughter, he noted that she — Deepali — is merely five-years-old.
Although the second body is yet to be identified, autopsy suggests that the woman would have been between 20-25 years old.
This implies that man’s daughter, Deepali, is missing. “The body they showed me was not of Deepali. She is out there somewhere,” he said adding that she is just a child, “she must be terrified”. “I don’t know what has happened to her,” the scared father added.
Chief Medical Officer Dr Virender Yadav said that they have sent the report and the DNA sample collected from Deepali to the police for further investigation. “The second deceased can’t be a child, as the body is of an adult woman,” Yadav added.
Reportedly, the bus — destined for Uttar Pradesh’s Hamirpur — had just left from the city late on Wednesday when it caught fire on the Sector 31 flyover at around 8:20 pm. The sleeper coach — operated by Shri Ram and Sons Travels — had 40 passengers and some of them had loaded 5 kg gas cylinders. It is suspected that those cylinders might have triggered the fire.
In this incident, two passengers died and 12 others were injured. Of the injured, three — with critical burn injuries — are admitted to Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital while the rest — with mild injuries — were treated at Gurgaon’s Civil Hospital.
Dinesh and his family were going to UP’s Rath town for Diwali festivities. “My wife was holding Deepali and I our son. My eldest daughter, Alka (7) was sitting next to us,” he said. Dinesh said that suddenly the bus was filled with smoke and the passengers could feel the heat. “Within few seconds, I saw people trying to break windows. I broke the window’s glass with our tiffin box and called out to the people outside to catch my son, following which I threw him out,” he was quoted as saying.
Another passenger, a 30-year-old Hemlata — travelling with her daughter is also admitted to the hospital with burn injuries — said that it felt like seeing “hellfire” as the flames, in no time, surrounded the bus leading the passengers to choke. Hemlata leapt out of the bus with her sleeping daughter, but her clothes caught fire.
“Everything was burning,” Hemlata said, adding that all the passengers were running put with their clothes on fire. “Luckily, I was able to save my daughter,” she was quoted as saying.
Another 33-year-old Mulayam Singh, had been asleep at the time and was woken up by the panic screams and shrieks of the fellow travelers. “Suddenly, the bus stopped. I have no idea where the fire started from, maybe someone was smoking,” he said. Singh felt like his lungs had given up. He also thought that he would die when someone was helping him get out of the bus.
Thakur Das was another person who got injured in this accident. Das was waiting to get permission from the doctor, so that he could go home. “I don’t want to stay here. I have burn all over my body, but I have seen enough in two days. Life is so unpredictable,” he said. Terming the bus as a “death trap”, Das said that he is a frequent traveler in buses and has never anything seen like this.