Mumbai-Bengaluru Highway: 18 killed as speeding truck carrying labourers, families veers off road

Many of the victims succumbed to severe head injuries that were caused by the metal tools, which they were carrying, for construction work. Some persons from the same group, who were following the truck on two-wheelers, alerted police.

Police officials and local administration officials reached the spot and shifted the victims to various hospitals in police cars and ambulances.

At the hospitals, 17 were declared dead, while one more succumbed to injuries later. The truck’s tyre marks at the spot suggested that the driver had tried to bring the vehicle under control, said police officials. The barricade and the wall, where the truck overturned, were damaged in the incident. On Tuesday afternoon, police booked the driver of the truck, the work contractor and owner on charges of negligence.

One of the injured victims, being treated at Khadala Hospital, said, “Most of us were being brought to Shirwal for the centring (shuttering) and concrete slab work on a building… we were going to move into temporary houses near the construction site in Shirwal.”

The bodies of the deceased were taken to a government hospital in Khandala in Satara, and later sent to their villages in Bijapur in four ambulances arranged by the police. The injured, some of whom are in a critical condition, are being treated in different hospitals.

In 2014, after 20 persons lost their lives in two accidents, Satara police had registered a criminal offence against the officials of National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the company which constructed the road, on charges of flawed design and construction leading to deaths.