COVID-19 Tragedy: 78-Yr-Old Dies As Police Stop Car At Chhattisgarh Border For 1 Hour

Raipur: In another heart-wrenching, horror story during the coronavirus-induced lockdown, a 78-year-old man died of a heart attack after being held up at a border check post for over an hour.

Keshav Mishra, a resident of Umaria, was being driven from Madhya Pradesh to a hospital in neighbouring Chhattisgarh. His two sons and wife were accompanying him.

Policemen who stopped the car refused to acknowledge his e-pass and also raised objections over the route, the Indian Express reported.

They had planned to take the septuagenarian to Bilaspur, but as the ailing man started feeling uneasy during the journey, his sons diverted the car towards Manendragadh in Chhattisgarh’s Koriya district.

“We had crossed Dhanpuri and Manendragadh was hardly 90 km away, while Bilaspur was nearly 200 km away. Since Manendragarh has an SECL hospital, we decided to take him there,” son Rakesh was quoted as saying.

But then the police started acting difficult.

According to witnesses, the ailing man himself stepped out of the car at one point and pleaded to police personnel with folded hands to let them proceed.

His son said by the time their passage was approved, his father had suffered a cardiac arrest and passed away. “After my father died, the sub-inspector on duty started abusing me, telling me I had been hiding a dead body,” he told Indian Express.

Refusing to accept the family’s plight, the state administration maintained that the man had died before their car had reached the border check point.

An investigation into the incident is under way.