Father Travels 230 Km In Search Of ‘Dead’ Son In Odisha Triple Train Crash, Finds Him Alive In Morgue

Helaram got the news of the deadly accident a few hours after he dropped off his son at Shalimar station to board the Coromandel Express. 

New Delhi: Biswajit Malik, a 24-year-old passenger boarded the ill-fated Coromandel Express which collided with another express train and a goods train that claimed 275 lives and left over 1,100 injured on Friday.

Minutes after the reports of Coromandel Express meeting the tragic accident in Odisha’s Balasore surfaced, Helaram, a shopkeeper based in West Bengal’s Howrah, dialled his son who was on board the train to know if he was okay.

Helaram got the news a few hours after he dropped off his son at Shalimar station to board the Coromandel Express.

Despite being in pain, Biswajit answered the call with a low voice and said that he was still alive but suffering greatly due to the train accident.

After listening to this, his father did not waste a single moment and contacted a local ambulance driver Palash Pandit to embark on his 230-km journey to the accident site in Balasore district. Accompanied by his brother-in-law, Dipak Das, Helaram arrived in Balasore late into the night on Friday.

However, despite inquiring at all the hospitals in the vicinity where train crash victims were being treated, Helaram could not find his son.

“We never gave up. We went around asking people, hoping to get leads on where to go next. One person told us that if we could not find anyone in the hospital, we should look at the Bahanaga high school, where the bodies were kept. We could not accept it, but went anyway,” Dipak told Times of India.

After hours of searching, Helaram and Dipak finally reached the morgue. While they were looking for Biswajit, a commotion broke out after a person saw movement in body. And it was non other than Helaram’s son Biswajit, who was lying there unconsciously and was injured badly.

Helaram immediately took him to the nearest hospital which referred him to Cuttack Medical College Hospital. But Helaram got his son discharged from the Cuttack hospital and drove to Kolkata where he underwent surgery at SSKM Hospital’s trauma care unit.

Odisha Triple Train Accident

At least 275 people died in the accident involving Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express, Shalimar-Chennai Central Coromandel Express and a goods train that took place near the Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore, located approximately 250 km south of Kolkata and 170 km north of Bhubaneswar on Friday at around 7 PM.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is poised to take charge of the investigation into the deadly train accident.