Woman falls off train fighting snatchers, dies

A 43-year-old woman fell off a train trying to stop a thief from snatching her handbag, the wheels severed one of her hands and a leg, and she bled to death in front of her helpless teenage son.

The tragedy happened near Old Delhi railway station early on Sunday and the man who took away Sudhir Bansal’s bag remained unidentified and untraced.

Bansal of Bhiwani in Haryana was accompanying 19-year-old son Gaurav to the national capital to help him with his admission formalities for the BSc course at Bhaskaracharya College of Applied Sciences of Delhi University. The teenager was to attend his first day in college on Monday. He had secured a university hostel seat as well.

They were coming from Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan, where his father works as a bank manager, and changed trains in Hary- ana’s Rewari and caught the Haridwar Mail to New Delhi early on Sunday.

As the train pulled into Old Delhi railway station around 5am, Sudhir and Gaurav waited with their luggage at the door.

Near Pul Mithai, barely 500m before the platform, the snatcher struck.

“Someone along the tracks below pulled my mother’s handbag. When my mother resisted, she was pulled off the train,” Gaurav said.

Gaurav immediately jumped off the slow-moving train and ran towards his mother, only to find she had been run over.

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