Five killed in road accident near Tumkur

Five Muslims associated with the Tableeghi Jamaath in Bangalore were killed in a road accident at Shivasandra in Tumkur near here on Tuesday.

Police said the five persons, who were returning to Bangalore after attending a three-day Ijthema at Arsikere in a Maruthi van, met with an accident on the Bangalore-National Highway when a truck hit their vehicle.

The deceased have been identified as Syed Ejazuddin, 55, Iqbal Naqvi, 52, Omar Sharief, 23, Sirajullah Khan, 55 and Sheikh Dawood, 45. All five persons killed in the road mishap are understood to be residents of Basavangudi in Bangalore.

The sixth person in the ill-fated vehicle Syed Munir Hussain, a software engineer, sufferred grievious injuries and is battling for life at a hospital in Tumkur.

The police and locals had a tough time extricating the dead bodies of the accident victims from the mangled remains of the Maruti van in which they were travelling.

The activists of Tableeghi Jamaath from Tumkur rushed to the spot to assist the authorities in removing the dead bodies from the Maruti van, which had been crushed under the truck. The lone survivor Syed Munir Hussian was rushed to a nearby hospital in Tumkur. Hussian is a relative of the President of Tumkur District Congress Committee Shafi Ahmed, according a Muslim clergy from Tumkur Syed Abdul Raheem.