Bhubaneswar, June 13 (IANS) The toll in the tragic triple train accident in Odisha's Balasore on Tuesday rose to 289 with the death of a man from Bihar while undergoing treatment, an official said.
Bijay Paswan, from Bihar's Motihari district, succumbed to his injuries at SCB Medical College and Hospital.
Paswan, along with six others, had boarded the Coromandel Express on June 2 from Howrah to visit Kerala's Palakkad. While one of them had died at the accident spot, another died today.
He was initially admitted to the Balasore district headquarter hospital and then shifted to the central ICU of SCB Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack with cervical spine injury and quadriplegia.
"The health condition of Paswan was stable when he was admitted at the hospital. However, his condition gradually deteriorated and yesterday, when his oxygen level started falling, we put him on a ventilator. Medicines given to raise his blood pressure too. Despite all efforts, he could not survive and passed away due to cardiac arrest," Professor Sudhanshu Sekhar Mishra, superintendent, SCB Medical College, said.
He also informed that the condition of another three people under treatment at the hospital is critical.
Kidneys of two other persons are not functioning properly while the brain of another was operated upon and his lungs also not functioning properly, said Mishra.
As per the latest data, nearly 1.25 crore passengers were carried by the domestic airlines during January, 2023 in the country as against 64 lakh during the same period last year. The passenger load factor or occupancy of the airlines remained on the higher side in the range of 80 to 90 per cent.
The accused were identified as Hardeep Harnal (35), a resident of Mohali, Punjab; Himanshu Verma (27), a resident of Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh; Sharafat Ali (29), a resident of Ambala, Haryana; and Sagar Bagga (30), a resident of Rohini in Delhi.
Mishra, who was arrested by the Delhi Police from Bengaluru on January 7 for allegedly urinating on a 70-year-old woman while in a drunken state on a flight last November, was granted bail on January 31 by national capital's Patiala House Court.
NCB Deputy Director General Gyaneshwar Singh said the woman was identified as Syeeda Abida. She had plans to travel from Delhi to Doha by a Qatar Airline flight but was apprehended at IGI Airport on March 10.
The two sessions of G20 are slated to be held in the state on March 15-17 and March 19-20. The first one is the second G20 Education Working Group Meeting, while the second is a two-day Labour 20 (L20) meeting.
On January 25, the Supreme Court granted interim bail for eight weeks to Ashish Mishra and directed him to leave Uttar Pradesh within one week of his release from jail. A bench comprising Justices Surya Kant and J.K. Maheshwari directed the sessions judge dealing with the trial of the case to keep apprising it about the future developments of the trial.
