Cluster bus driver involved in two accidents, one of them fatal, held for driving drunk

Police have arrested the driver of a cluster bus that was involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident in north Delhi’s Kashmere Gate on October 1, after their probe and eyewitness accounts revealed that the 45-year-old driver was allegedly drunk at the time of the accident.

Police said they questioned scores of potential eyewitnesses and checked the GPS data of multiple cluster buses to zero in on the errant driver, identified as Pardeep alias Nagraj, who had fled the scene of accident.

On October 1, the Kashmere Gate police had responded to a call from a passerby and reached the Kashmere Gate Metro station to find a man, a pedestrian, crushed to death. He was identified as 33-year-old Sanjay, the father of three children and a resident of Maujpur in north-east Delhi. He worked as a clerk with a private firm in Chandni Chowk.

Police said Nagraj may have gone scot-free had it not been for another accident that his bus was involved in, in west Delhi’s Mayapuri, soon after the one in Kashmere Gate.

“In Mayapuri, his bus collided with a truck. He was caught and the bus seized. Nagraj’s medical examination after that accident revealed that he driving under the influence,” said Anto Alphonse, deputy commissioner of police (north).

The marshal and conductor on the bus also said Nagraj was driving in an inebriated condition. “They told us that they had refused to board the bus that night as he was drunk,” the DCP said. Although it is against the rules to ply a cluster bus without the conductor and marshal present on board, Nagraj went ahead anyway, police said

Nagraj, police said, was previously involved in 13 other crimes, including murder, attempt to murder and even two cases of fatal accidents. While he was acquitted in both fatal accident cases, he was convicted in a case registered under the Arms Act, the police said. How such a person managed to gain employment as driver of a cluster bus is being ascertained, police said.

Police said when CCTV footage failed to provide actionable leads in the Kashmere Gate hit-and-run case, they started speaking to potential eyewitnesses. “We managed to find a few eyewitnesses who said the accident was caused by a cluster bus. After the accident, the bus took a U-turn and travelled on the wrong side of the road,” said the DCP.

So, the police got a list of 30 such cluster buses which had left the Mori Gate terminal around the time of the accident. “We checked the GPS locations and movement of all those buses and found that one plying on Route Number 753 had taken a U-turn and travelled on the wrong side of the road,” Alphonse said.

Once details of the driver was obtained, Nagraj was arrested from his home in Issapur village in outer Delhi on Tuesday.