Three people - two from Calcutta - were killed on Sunday when their Chevrolet Aveo rammed into a lorry from behind on the Durgapur Expressway near Dadpur in Hooghly.

Doctors at Imambara Hospital in Hooghly's Chinsurah declared Sandip Kundu, 20, and Anthony Saha, 28, dead while Naina Khanna died of her injuries at NRS Medical College and Hospital later in the evening.

The other three passengers - Neeraj Jaiswal, 18, Arijit Saha, 18, and Vijayshree Khanna, 21 - are being treated at various city hospitals, police said.

All the four men are from Calcutta but police could not confirm till late on Sunday if the two women are from the city.

The accident took place on the Calcutta-bound flank around 6am near a fuel pump at the Maheshwarpur crossing in Dadpur, about 70km from the city.

"The car hit the lorry when it was getting on to the expressway from the service road," Koteswara Rao, additional superintendent of police, Hooghly, said. "It seems the car was speeding and the driver could not stop on time."

The bonnet and the front seats were smashed and the car had turned into a mangled heap of metal under the impact.

The police had to get a crane to pull the car out from behind the lorry.

"We found a cell phone at the spot... but we couldn't do much as it was a smartphone and was locked," an officer of Dadpur police station said.

Arijit Saha, who was the least injured, managed to tell doctors that they were returning to Calcutta after a long drive and late dinner at a dhaba on Durgapur Expressway. But he could not give more details as he was in a semi-conscious state and could hardly speak, the police said.

Sandip Kundu's uncle Soumen Saha told Metro that his nephew had left home on Saturday evening, saying he would be late.

"A police officer told us about the accident around 7am," he said. 'When we reached the hospital we were told that Sandip had died." Sandip was unemployed.

A relative of Neeraj Jaiswal said the family was too stressed to talk.

Subhas Chandra Mondal, the superintendent of Imambara Hospital, said all passengers except Arijit were severely injured in the head and face.

Vijayshree Khanna was operated upon for almost three hours at NRS Medical College and Hospital on Sunday evening. At the hospital in Chinsurah, she had regained consciousness for a while and tried to speak to a doctor.

The doctor felt she said that they were students of Jaipuria College in north Calcutta. The police immediately got in touch with the college principal, Ashok Mukhopadhyay.

"I visited NRS hospital after hearing the accident victims were our students," he said. "We went through the college records to establish their identity. But it was of no use."

The police later found that Anthony Saha, one of the deceased, and Arijit are brothers from Jyangra in Hatiara, on the northern fringe, of the city.

Their elder brother Abhishek said the two had told him that they were headed for Tarapith with two girls. Both Anthony and Arijit were unemployed, he said. "The car belonged to Jaiswal, who runs a small business in the Baguiati area."

The cell phone seized from the accident spot belonged to Naina, the police said.

The lorry driver has been arrested and his vehicle seized.