UK Court Finds Lorry Driver Guilty Over Accident That Killed 8 Indians

A UK court on March 6 found a Polish truck driver guilty of causing the death of eight Indians and injuries to four other people in one of the country’s worst motorway accidents in 2017, PTI reported. The last time the country saw such fatalities was in November of 1993 when 12 children and a teacher died.

The jury at Reading Crown Court found that 31-year-old Ryszard Masierak was two times over the legal drunk drive limit and had stopped his truck in the inside lane of the highway, reportedly sleeping for 12 minutes. His truck blocked the road, which forced others to slow down before moving around him. The court was told that the Indian-origin driver of the minibus waited with his hazards lights on to go around Masierak’s truck until a second truck crashed into the back of the van. The impact led the van to crash into and then go under Masierak’s heavy goods vehicle. The minibus was flattened. The crash happened near Newport Pagnell in southern UK, 80 km from London, on Aug. 26.

Masierak was pronounced guilty by the jury and was also convicted of four counts of causing serious injury by dangerous driving, in relation to injuring four other passengers — including a four-year-old girl orphaned by the crash.

The jury hasn’t given a verdict on 53-year-old British citizen David Wagstaff,who drove the second truck involved in the crash. The prosecution noted: “In Mr Wagstaff’s case, on a hands-free call, his lorry on cruise control and he on auto-pilot, completely failing to notice what was ahead of him in full view for some time, inattention on a gross scale.”

The sentencing will take place after the jury pronounces Wagstaff’s verdict some time this week.

Cyriac Joseph, the 52-year-old minibus driver who died in the accident, hailed from Kerala and lived in Nottingham. He was hired to drive Indian passengers from Nottingham to London so that they could join a European holiday tour group. The plan was to go the Disneyland in Paris. Among the Indians killed were three IT professionals from software giant Wipro.

The deceased passengers were identified as Panneerselvam Annamalai, Rishi Ranjeev Kumar, Vivek Baskaran, Lavanyalakshmi Seetharaman, Karthikeyan Pugalur Ramasubramanian, Subramaniyan Arachelvan and Tamilmani Arachelvan.