Speeding car mows down three in Bangalore

A speeding car mowed down three employees of the Postal Department late in the night on Raj Bhavan Road in Bangalore, raising fresh concerns over drunken driving in the City.

The offender, a manager in an English weekly magazine, was ripping through the Minsk Square in Bangalore when five night-shift employees of the Postal Department were crossing the Raj Bhavan Road to return for duty at General Post Office after a meal in a canteen nearby.

The speeding car, while negotiating a steep curve leading to Raj Bhavan, ploughed through three of the five postal department employees crossing the road. Even as the remaining two scrambled to safety, the killer car sped away. The three employees Srinath, 35, R Vincent, 40, and Shivappa, 39, who worked as sorting assistants in the postal department, lay bleeding on the road till a vehicle was arranged to rush them to the nearby Bowring Hospital.

While Srinath died on the spot, the remaining two succumbed to injuries at Bowring and Wockhardt Hospital on Saturday. All the deceased had sufferred severe injuries on their heads and spleen.

The car driver may have got away with the hit-and-run case, but for the shattered registration number plate recovered from the site of the accident. A colleague of the victims Harish collected the broken number plates and handed them over to the Traffic Police.

The police found out that the car belonged to Nikhil Ganesh Talwade, 29, who worked as a manager in an English weekly magazine and a resident of R T Nagar in Bangalore. A team of policemen reached Nikhil’s residence on Saturday and took him into custody.

Though Nikhil initially pleaded ignorance, he later confessed to the crime after the police brought up the number plate records. He said he had consumed liquor before heading home on the fateful night.
Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic), Bangalore, M N Reddi told reporters that hit and run cases account for more than 15 per cent of the 7,000 accident cases reported in Bangalore every year. “Only five per cent of the hit-and-run cases are identified”, he said