Four Trinamul workers from Hooghly’s Khanakul were killed and two injured when the car in which they were travelling to Digha for a vacation collided head-on with a truck on NH41 in East Midnapore’s Tamluk on Thursday morning.
The deceased were Dipankar Bar, 34, Trinamul working president of a local unit, Prosenjit Diger, 46, chief of the party’s youth wing in Kishorepur 1 gram panchayat, and workers Dilip Samanta, 50 and Raj Kumar Pandit, 36.
Sital Maji, a Trinamul member of Kishorpur 1 gram panchayat, and party worker Asish Sanki were seriously injured and admitted to a Calcutta hospital in critical conditions.
Police said the group was travelling to Digha on the Kolaghat-Haldia stretch of NH41 in a Maruti Alto around 3.30am when their car collided head on with a truck. Sources said the truck had been entering the turnpike from a state highway. The accident was spotted by a police patrolling van which rushed the victims to Tamluk district hospital. Four were declared brought dead there.
“It was early in the morning and there was a dense fog which might have led to the accident. We have arrested the driver of the truck and seized the vehicle,” said a police officer in Tamluk, adding that the car was registered in the name of Dipankar Bar.
Family members and Trinamul workers in Hooghly said Dipankar had been driving his friends and colleagues to Digha for a two-day trip.
“My brother and his friends planned to visit Digha abruptly on Wednesday evening. I got the news of the accident early Thursday morning,” said Sandip Bar, the Trinamul chief of Kishorpur 1 gram panchayat and elder brother of Dipankar.