Bijender Shah, 43, a taxi driver, would begin his shift in the afternoon and drive through the night, retiring only in the early hours of the morning, often working up to 16 hours a day. All his hard work, Shah’s relatives and friends said, was for one thing only — to ensure that his five children, aged between 12 and 20, get a good education.
At around 11pm, the 43-year-old, picked up two passengers from Mahipalpur in south Delhi. However, the two passengers pushed Shah out of the Maruti Swift Dzire and tried to drive off. Details of the incident remain unclear, but according to police, Shah, attempted to save his means of livelihood but got entangled on the underside of the car, and was dragged for around a few meters before the body was dropped on the side of a service road on National Highway 48.
A video of the incident, purportedly shot by the occupants of another vehicle on the road, went viral on social media. To be sure, it is unclear where precisely on NH-48 the video is shot, though it appears to be a spot about half a kilometre before the Mahipalpur flyover.
Police said they received information about the incident at 11.20pm, and when a team reached the spot where Shah’s body was dropped, they found his clothes torn at places, while his body had multiple injuries. He was rushed to a city hospital, where he was declared dead. His PAN card was found at the scene enabling the police to reach out to his family.
“Bijender used to leave home every day around 2pm, and return only around 6am the next day, so his family was used to being asleep by the time he arrived. Except on Wednesday morning, he didn’t come home,” his younger brother Nagender Shah, 40, said, who drove an autorickshaw, as he waited for Shah’s remains at the Safdarjung hospital mortuary.
Nagender would later formally identify his brother’s body at the mortuary. “All I could see was blood,” he said.
Late on Wednesday night, the two suspects, identified as Mehraj Salmani, 33, and Mohammad Asif, 24, had disguised as passengers boarding the taxi from Saket. Both reside in Meerut and were carrying extensive criminal cases of 15 records. They were arrested in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh and the car was recovered from them.
The sole breadwinner of his family, Shah had been a taxi driver since 2010, and was living on rent at Surya Colony in Faridabad’s Sehatpur for the past five years, and was putting his five children — two boys, aged 12 and 14, and three daughters, aged 16, 18 and 20 — through school and college.
“Shah used to spend a lot on his children’s education and wanted them to do well in life and get good jobs. His eldest daughter is a student of Deshbandhu College in Delhi University, and is preparing for the civil services examinations,” said NN Tiwari, Shah’s landlord said he was close to the family as they were both originally from the same village in Bihar’s Motihari district.
“He single-handedly earned for his family and didn’t let any of his children work… He pushed them to study,” said Nagender.
After seeing the video circulating online, the family expressed shock that the person filming, along with others on the road, did nothing to stop the suspects. “Nobody overtook them and stopped them. It’s not possible that no one noticed the body stuck to the car,” said Tiwari.
Shah’s death was the second tragedy in the family — his mother Lalti Devi had died just a month ago, and the family had recently returned from Bihar after conducting the last rites.
“Our family was just overcoming one loss, and now we have lost Bijender too,” said Nagender.
Evidence had proven that Shah put up a resilient fight against the attackers, which led to his gruesome death.
The video recorded by the occupants of another vehicle shows the victim trapped at the driver’s seat gate, helplessly being dragged. Concerned witnesses can be heard in the video identifying the man as a driver and confirming his passing. They continuously honked their horn in a bid to alert the car’s driver, seemingly unaware of the criminals at the wheel. The carjackers eventually terminated their pursuit by suddenly applying the brakes, causing the victim’s body to detach from the car.
After conducting a thorough investigation, the police established that this was indeed a case of carjacking. Shah had been robbed at gunpoint during the tragic ordeal.
A source disclosed, “After reviewing the footage from CCTV cameras along the route, we determined that the accused had taken the car to Meerut.”
