The Bihar government on Friday clarified that no one was killed when a bus fell into a roadside ditch and caught fire at Bagra in Motihari on Thursday.
Initial reports had suggested that there were 32 passengers in the bus and only five of them had been rescued. Soon after the accident, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, his deputy in the Cabinet Sushil Kumar Modi and State officials had expressed grief over the tragedy. The State government also announced ₹4 lakh ex-gratia to the family members of the deceased.
However, State Disaster Management Department Minister Dinesh Chandra Yadav on Friday said, “The information of death in the bus accident on Thursday was wrong as it was coming from various sources… yes, I’d said that 27 people have died in the accident but I had also said that final figure of how many people have died will be confirmed later”. The department secretary Pratay Amrit said that “teams of NDRF, SDRF, FSL and the local police have not found any trace of human casualty at the accident site… so as of now we can say that no death was reported in the bus tragedy”.
An injured passenger, Sanjiv Kumar, told journalists that 13 passengers had boarded the bus at Muzaffarpur. He said that when the bus turned turtle he jumped out of the window. “A gentleman dropped me at the government hospital at Motihari where I saw six other passengers… I do not know about the rest of passengers,” he said.
