Accident snuffs out three lives

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, July 18

A road accident has claimed the lives of three persons, all of a family. While a couple was killed on the spot, a 65-year-old woman was seriously injured in a car accident on Wednesday night, who, later, also died in a hospital here.

The accident reportedly took place around 10.30 pm on the Jalandhar-Amritsar highway near Focal Point. While Kulwant Kaur died in the hospital, her son Gagandeep Singh (33) and daughter-in-law Gurkiran Kaur (31) were killed on the spot. The family, hailing from Guru Nanak Colony in Ludhiana, was on its way to meet Gurkiran’s parents at a village near Maqsudan here.

The area SHO informed that in a bid to save a stray cattle moving across the road, Gagandeep, who was behind the wheel, lost control of it and the car crashed into the divider and further rammed an electric pole after turning over several times. With the help of commuters, the bodies of the couple were extracted from the damaged car.

Gagandeep’s father, who reached the spot at midnight, said, his son Gagandeep had married Gurkiran last year. While Gagandeep was a government professor, Gurkiran was working as a government engineer in Chandigarh. A wailing Sukhdev said, “Now, he has no one to live with here. His two NRI sons, younger to Gagandeep, have left for Jalandhar.”

It’s not the first incident that claimed the lives of a young couple on the Jalandhar-Amritsar highway. In most fatal accidents that took place on the highway in the past, the reasons are mostly same: the absence of streetlights and the presence of animals on the highway. Commuters rue that despite having proper electric poles on the highway, the authorities have failed to fix bulbs in them. At times, accidents occur due to zero visibility in the night.