Goa Highway accident: 7 youngsters from Mumbai cremated

Two of the victims’ mothers were only told of their sons’ deaths on Thursday morning, after their bodies arrived at their home in Shivaji Nagar

Hundreds of Vile Parle residents thronged the Chakala crematorium for the last rites of the seven men killed in the Mumbai-Goa Highway accident. The funeral was carried out at Parsiwada near the Western Express Highway on Thursday morning.

Locals gather in large numbers to pay their respects to the seven friends who died in the highway accident, at Vile Parle (East) on Thursday. (Prashant Waydande/HT)

The bodies of the seven men were brought to the city from Ratnagiri in an ambulance and were transported to the crematorium by truck.

Sachin Sawant, Prashant Gurav, Akshay Kerkar, Nihal Kotiyan, Kedar Tondkar, Vaibhav Manve, Mayur Belnekar and Abhishek Kambli were headed to Goa in a Mahindra Xylo when their car crashed into a tree on Wednesday at 7.30 am. Only Kambli survived.

The victims’ car rammed into a tree on the Mumbai-Goa Highway on Wednesday.

Two of the victims’ mothers were only told of their sons’ deaths on Thursday morning, after their bodies arrived at their home in Shivaji Nagar. The mother of one of the victims was carried away on a stretcher during the cremation and had to be hospitalised. The father of one of the men fainted owing to shock.

The distraught relatives of Akshay Kelkar, one of the victims, at Vile Parle (East) on Thursday.

Residents arranged for a funeral procession to mourn the deaths of the men they called ‘the seven friendliest people in the area’. Locals fondly remembered them as ‘good children’, who arranged annual trips to Shirdi for devotees, for a fraction of the cost.

The father of one of the men fainted at the funeral procession owing to shock.

The procession started around 10 am and the bodies of Sawant, Kerkar, Kotiyan, Tondkar and Belnekar were cremated by afternoon.

Locals stayed at the crematorium till the final rites were performed for the bodies of Manve and Gurav.

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