Angry at being asked not to smoke in public, a ‘drunk lawyer’ allegedly rammed his car into the motorcycle of a 21-year-old photography student near the AIIMS Trauma Centre in south Delhi on Sunday.
The student, Gurpreet Singh, who was in coma since Sunday, succumbed to his injuries on Wednesday. The lawyer has been arrested.
Police had initially booked the accused, Rohit Krishna Mahanta, for rash driving and causing hurt by an act of negligence, and he was released on bail. But after the victim died, the police again arrested Mahanta and slapped charges of murder on him.
The accused lawyer is working under a standing counsel of the Assam government.
The victim’s family alleged that police had initially tried to ignore the true facts of the case and tried to pass it off as a simple case of accident, which resulted in the lawyer getting the bail. However, once the victim’s friend, who was also injured in the accident, narrated the incident on Wednesday and the case was highlighted by media, Delhi police booked the lawyer for murder.
Singh, a native of Bhatinda in Punjab, had been pursuing a photography course from Delhi College of Photography in north Delhi. He lived with his classmate Maninder Singh in a rented accommodation in Shahbad Dairy.
Gurpreet Singh and his friend Maninder Singh, 22, were out shooting for a project given by their photography institute on the life of the city's pavement dwellers. At 4.30 in the morning on 17 September, they stopped at the eatery near the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in south Delhi for tea and snacks.
The accused came along soon after in his car.
He lit up a cigarette near them and was blowing the smoke in their face, Gurpreet Singh's father told NDTV. "We asked him to move a little away so that the smoke does not come towards us," added Maninder Singh, who had also received injuries in the accident.
An argument followed.
"He told us had you been in Assam, I would have killed you and no one would have got to know about it," he said. They left soon after.
They must have gone just 300 metres when this man crashed his car into them, and then hit an auto-rickshaw and a radio cab too. It is the cab driver who first called the police. The two young men on the bike were in no shape to move.
Maninder Singh called up his friend's family in Punjab's Bhatinda around 6.30 am to tell them about the crash.