New Delhi, June 1: An airline bus today knocked down and killed a Ukrainian passenger at Delhi airport, criticised by the Planning Commission deputy chairman for its chronic chaos that has drawn comparisons to a “country bus station”.

Transit passenger Mykhailo Bershadsky was rammed as he stood just outside the international terminal in the early hours, taking his luggage off the boot of the inter-terminal airport bus. Two fellow passengers, also collecting their luggage, and the shuttle-coach assistant were injured.

“The driver of the bus (hired by an airline to ferry its crew) apparently failed to apply the brakes,” an airport source said. The driver has been detained.

A statement from the Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL) claimed the “bus carrying the airline crew had stopped and seemingly jerked forward and hit them”.

DIAL is in charge of the airport’s modernisation process which, Montek Singh Ahluwalia had said three weeks ago, was progressing too slowly and spreading congestion and chaos.

The plan panel deputy chairman had rapped the civil aviation ministry and GMR, a partner in DIAL, setting off a public spat with minister Praful Patel.

The airport has seen two fatal accidents since then, with the first coming a week ago when Jet Airways employee Sanjeev Kumar was knocked down on the tarmac by, of all things, an ambulance.

Today, Bershadsky was declared dead on arrival at the Indian Spinal Injury Centre, near the airport. Shambhu Prasad, a passenger from Nepal, is stable and has been kept in the hospital for observation.

Patel, however, had in a letter to Ahluwalia scoffed at “your private visit to Delhi airport, which resulted in inconvenience to you and your personal guests”.

It was one of Ahluwalia’s friends, US-India Business Council president Ron Somers, who had described the airport as “a country bus station at best, after two years of reconstruction” after being caught in the bottleneck there in February.