A 37-year-old man died after he was allegedly assaulted, placed on the roof of a moving car with his hands trapped between its front windows, and driven for around a kilometre and a half before being thrown onto the road and run over in Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur, in an incident that has shocked the city and drawn the attention of the state's police machinery.
The victim, Biru Singh Bhadauria, worked as a salesman for a food products company and lived in the Arra area of Kanpur, under the Hanumant Vihar police area. He is survived by his wife, Reena Singh, and their three children, two daughters, Sevi and Ishani, and a son, Viraj.
The incident took place on Tuesday night, October 20, at around 10.30 pm, as Bhadauria was returning home from a Dussehra fair. According to his family, he had an earlier dispute with two men identified as Rajveer and Mewalal. On Tuesday night, Mewalal allegedly arrived in a car with Rajveer and three other men and intercepted Bhadauria while he was on his way home.
The group allegedly assaulted him. When Bhadauria tried to escape, the accused hit him with the car. They then placed him on the roof of the vehicle, trapped both his hands between the front windows, and drove away with the windows shut. The vehicle was then driven for approximately 1.5 km at high speed, according to reports citing the family.
Bhadauria was thrown from the moving car or fell onto the road near Ashwani Trading Company in Rajendra Nagar, after which the occupants allegedly ran over him and fled the spot. He suffered several serious injuries, including badly crushed fingers after they were trapped in the windows.
A passerby, Devendra Singh Chauhan, recognised Bhadauria and alerted his family. His relatives first took him to a private hospital. He was later shifted to Hallet Hospital as his condition deteriorated, but doctors declared him dead on Wednesday afternoon.
The family has alleged that Bhadauria was murdered, rejecting the possibility that it was an accident. His father, Ram Shankar Singh, said his son had a dispute with Rajveer and Mewalal a few days before the incident. Reena Singh, the victim's wife, has called for CCTV footage to be examined and for the accused to be brought to justice.
CCTV footage from the area reportedly shows a man being carried on the roof of a moving car. The family has claimed that more than a dozen cameras recorded the sequence of events, with two clips reportedly emerging showing the injured man on the roof of the speeding car.
His family has also said the car was traced using its registration number, and investigators are examining the accused persons' mobile phone locations, with preliminary findings reportedly placing a mobile phone linked to the case in Jahanabad in Fatehpur district.
The incident triggered a protest by the family on Wednesday. Bhadauria's relatives placed his body on the Hamirpur Highway, demanding action and alleging that police had not registered an FIR despite receiving their complaint. The protest underlined the family's fear that the case could be diluted into a routine accident report.
Abhishek Kumar Rahul, Assistant Commissioner of Police for Naubasta in Kanpur, said the CCTV footage is being investigated. "We have received a complaint from Kuldeep Singh Bhadauria, the elder brother of Biru, alleging that his brother was hit by a car. The investigation is underway," he said.
According to one report, a senior police officer said the family had initially reported the incident as a road accident before later alleging murder. The police are investigating both versions and have said appropriate action will follow if the murder allegations are substantiated.
The official Kanpur Commissionerate police handle had posted that a man was seriously injured after being hit by an unidentified vehicle on Arra Road on Tuesday night, and that he succumbed to his injuries during treatment the following day.
A case has been registered under relevant sections, the postmortem examination has been conducted, and further legal action is underway, with investigators examining CCTV footage to establish the sequence of events and identify those involved.
The case has chilling echoes of other cases in which vehicles have been used as instruments of assault, and the CCTV footage described by investigators will be central to establishing what happened in those 1.5 kilometres on the night of October 20. For the family, the questions are immediate and stark: who ordered the assault, why was Bhadauria placed on the roof of the car, and why was he then run over.
The police search for the accused is underway. The investigation is expected to hinge on the CCTV recordings, the vehicle registration details, and the mobile location data that investigators are now examining. The family's demand for a murder case to be registered, rather than an accident report, will shape the legal course of the case in the coming days.
Kanpur has witnessed several high-profile cases of road violence in recent years, and this incident has once again raised questions about law and order in the city's outskirts. The Hanumant Vihar police area, where the incident occurred, has seen increased police presence since the incident, as the investigation continues.
The death has left three young children without a father and a family demanding answers. The state's police machinery now faces the task of reconstructing the events of that night from the cameras that watched it happen, and of delivering justice in a case that has already become a symbol of the violence that can unfold on India's roads after dark.
The investigation is also examining the claim that the accused drove through areas covered by more than two dozen CCTV cameras, a density of surveillance that investigators believe could provide a near-continuous reconstruction of the vehicle's route. If the footage confirms the family's account, it would turn the case from a disputed allegation into one of the most documented instances of road violence in the state's recent history.
(Reporting based on NDTV, Hindustan Times and The Times of India.)