Mandsaur: Four people were killed and two others critically injured when a speeding SUV crashed into the rear of a moving truck on the Delhi-Mumbai eight-lane Expressway in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur district on Thursday morning. The fatal collision occurred around 11 am near Titrod village under the jurisdiction of the Sitamau police station, where the impact completely mangled the front half of the vehicle, trapping all six occupants inside.
The victims, identified as traders and businessmen from Aurangabad (Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar) in Maharashtra, were travelling towards Delhi to purchase commercial goods when the driver reportedly lost control of the high-speed vehicle. Passing motorists and local residents rushed to the spot to initiate initial rescue efforts before emergency medical teams and highway patrol police arrived. Emergency personnel spent nearly an hour cutting through the crushed wreckage to extract the victims.
All six occupants were rushed to the Sitamau Community Health Centre, where doctors declared four of them dead on arrival. Sitamau police station in-charge Kamlesh Prajapati confirmed that two of the deceased have been identified as Ravindra Kale and Sachin Gangadhar Gajbhare, both prominent residents of Aurangabad, while authorities are working to verify the identities of the remaining two deceased. Following the collision, the truck driver fled the scene with the heavy vehicle. The two injured survivors have been transferred to the Mandsaur District Hospital for advanced medical care, and regional police have launched a comprehensive investigation using expressway surveillance and CCTV cameras to track down the absconding truck.
