Two students die in drink-driving crash in Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar

Two college students were killed as a joyride with friends turned fatal when the woman behind the wheel, who was allegedly drunk, lost control and crashed the car at high speed on a road divider in north Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar early on Sunday morning, police said.

The victims were 20-year-old Siddharth Singh, a student of Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology in Janakpuri, and 21-year-old Ritesh Dahiya, who studied at Delhi University’s Sri Venkateswara College.

Three women studying law at Amity University in Noida were injured. Police arrested the 19-year-old woman who was driving the Hyundai i20 and booked her for causing death by negligence. “Diksha Dadu, a first-year Amity University law student was drunk at the time of the crash,” deputy commissioner of police (north-west) Aslam Khan said. According to an investigating officer, alcohol bottles and plastic disposable cups were found in the wreckage of the car. Police are awaiting the medical report of the five students.

Police said Dadu and another woman in the front seats escaped critical injuries as the airbags deployed on impact.

The three on the rear seat were gravely injured as the speeding car climbed the road divider, knocked down an iron board, a cement slab and a marble signboard before flipping and colliding with a traffic signal around 2.30am, police said.

The three women are from the same batch at Amity University. Dadu lives with her parents in Rohini, while her two friends stay in a hostel. The students’ families declined to comment.

Giving the sequence of events, an investigator said the women had gone for dinner to Murthal to celebrate a successful mock parliament they had at their university. “They were joined by two friends — Singh and Dahiya, who had brought his car. They visited a 24x7 outlet in Connaught Place before driving to DU’s North Campus and nearby markets,” said the investigator, who asked not to be named.

“The damage to the car and objects it collided with suggest the vehicle was driven at more than 100kmph,” he said.

According to police, the car brought down a traffic signal on another road divider.

“A very loud sound, similar to a blast, drew my attention … The woman in the driver’s seat managed to pull herself out, but the others were trapped. We worked 15 minutes to extricate all the people. The two men had died by then,” said Ashok Arora, a shopkeeper in the area.