Stationary truck catches fire in Madhu Bazaar, burnt corpse recovered

Mail News Service

Chaibasa, Feb 17: A stationary truck parked in Madhu Bazaar caught fire on Tuesday-Wednesday midnight. The truck’s front portion was charred. The Chaibasa police and fire brigade team doused the flames. On Wednesday morning, local people saw a burnt body in the seat behind thre driver’s cushion. The police was informed and they arrived and took the body under their possession and sent it for postmortem. The body could not be discovered during dousing of the flames because of darkness.

A lady staying near the place of the fire incident was informed over the phone about the mishap. Later she informed, “I was away from home and was at a relative’s place. When the information came, I informed my folks at home who immediately informed the police and urged for a fire brigade to be sent. Both, the police and the fire department personnel managed to quell the fire.”

Many posers were doing the rounds in Chaibasa regarding the fire in the truck which reportedly belonged to Madhu Bazaar resident Upendra Kumar. Whether the charred body was that of the truck driver or someone else was not known till the time of going to press. However, another angle to the riddle of the burnt copse was that the truck had been parked at the spot of incidence since the past 10-15 days and thus the body being that of the driver was being ruled out. Another angle that the authorities are looking at is that someone could have been murdered and the body put in the stationary truck and the vehicle was set on fire.

The lady informed further that approximately two years ago, their family truck was parked at the same spot at Madhu Bazaar and had caught fire. The fire brigade personnel had doused the fire that had caught on to the tarpaulin that was on the truck. The fire had then emanated from garbage that had been set on fire.

On the other hand, the doctors at the Sadar Hospital morgue refused to conduct autopsy on the burnt body stating that postmortem of burned victims required the presence of a forensic team which was not available at the Sadar Hospital. The body was then referred to Jamshedpur.

Though police are continuing to investigate the matter, the question of the corpse being that of a human or some other animal was stated to be that of a human as per SDPO Amar Kumar Pandey’s statement.