Kolkata, Mar 14 Five persons, including three children, were killed and eight others injured severely in a horrific road accident at Chapra in West Bengal's Nadia district on Friday when the entire state was plunged in a mood of celebration for the Holi festival, or "Dolyatra".
It is learned that the accident happened when a Toto, a battery-operated bigger version of an e-rickshaw, packed with passengers, collided head-on with a speeding four-wheeler.
A district police official said that the passengers travelling by the Toto were residents of nearby Nakashipara and they had come to Chapra on Friday morning to buy some items from the market for the forthcoming Eid festival.
"While they were going back to Nakashipara by the same Toto, it had a head-on collision with the four-wheeler. The impact of the collision was such that three kids died on the spot," the official said.
The accident took place near a petrol pump located at the Krishnanagr-Karimpur state highway.
Eyewitnesses said that the local people started the initial rescue operations and later they were joined by the personnel from the Chapra police station.
"First the bodies of the three kids were recovered and by that time, they were dead. Ten others, some of them critically injured, were shifted to the Chapra Rural Hospital. Later, we received information that two among the ten had died in the hospital," an area resident, who took an active role in the rescue operation, said.
He said that the four-wheeler was being driven at an unusually high speed which made the impact of the collision more.
Meanwhile, the district police official said that since the Chapra Rural Hospital did not have adequate infrastructure for handling such critical emergency cases, the injured have been shifted to the nearby Shaktinagar District Hospital.
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