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Bolpur, June 15: A young man died after falling off the Varanasi-Sealdah Express in Birbhum this morning following a scuffle with the ticket checker.
Passengers said the youth was travelling with a local train ticket and refused to pay a fine when the ticket checker asked him to.
The train made an unscheduled stop at the nearby Mallarpur station after the guard noticed passengers of the general compartment in which the incident happened leaning out of doors in a bid to get his and the driver’s attention.
Passengers beat up ticket checker Manoj Kumar Ram, who was rescued by police and taken to hospital.
While the passengers and Ram said the youth, who is yet to be identified, fell off the train during the scuffle, a senior railway official said he jumped off after seeing the checker.
The youth, in his early twenties, had suffered injuries to his head and other parts of the body after falling on stones piled on the side of the tracks.
Bijoy Gupta, a Rampurhat resident who was travelling in the general compartment of the Varanasi-Sealdah Express, said: “The compartment was crowded. I heard a heated exchange between the TTE and a youth near one of the doors. The arguments escalated into a scuffle. Then I saw the youth falling off the train.”
The passengers said the youth was speaking a smattering of Bengali and Hindi.
After the train stopped at Mallarpur, the passengers dragged Ram out of the train and beat him up severely.
Ram was taken to Rampurhat subdivisional hospital. On the way, he told reporters: “During a heated exchange, he fell off the train.”
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