Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Nurpur, Rakesh Pathania, who supervised the rescue operations at the site of school bus accident near Nurpur on 9 April, which killed 27 persons, including 23 children, personally on Thursday strongly refuted the report that aggrieved parents had to wait for bodies of children for delay in Chief Minister’s arrival.
“It was very tragic and painful. But even in that utter confusion after so many deaths of children, we tried to do all the procedures meticulously, right from rescue to post-mortem and handing over of bodies to the last rites.
That is what we could have done for the grief-stricken families. The bodies were handed over to parents as soon as the autopsy were over. Nobody was made to wait for political leaders,” Pathania said in the same breath.
Talking to media persons, he deplored a “factually incorrect media report”, which he said had gone viral on social media. “There should be no politics on this issue,” he said.
The private school bus was on way back to drop the children, aged below 12 years, from Wazir Ram Singh Pathania School Ahead of Nurpur, when it plunged into a gorge.
Narrating the sequence of events, he said immediately after the accident, the locals and the home guard jawans in Nurpur helped in rescue operations. It took four hours to retrieve the bodies in the evening.
“The victims who were taken to Pathankot hospital and died there had to be brought to Nurpur government hospital for autopsy. The post mortems of all the deceased were conducted around, 10 a.m. Within 8-10 minutes, the bodies were handed over to the parents,” he said.
“It was a depressing situation. Some parents were not ready to accept that their child had died and they did not identify their child initially. That was natural. Even I could not do anything in that situation, but to have patience and console them,” he said.