Was bus driver crushed by a falling meteor?
A BUS driver is thought to have become one of the very few people in history to have been killed by a meteorite.
The man is said to have stopped his vehicle in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to get a drink when he was struck by the rock from space.
Indian authorities said the object crashed near an engineering college, leaving a crater in the ground and shattering window panes.
Two gardeners and a student were hurt, said officials, while the 40-yearold bus driver, who has not been named, was seriously injured and died on the way to the hospital.
Images in local media showed a blueish rock, which Tamil Nadu’s chief minister Jayalalithaa Jayaram described as a ‘meteorite’ – although scientists say this has not yet been proved. She said the man’s family had been awarded 100,000 rupees, around £1,020, in compensation.
Plausible accounts of people dying by meteorite are exceptionally rare. They include the 1825 death of a man in Oriang, India, and of a farmer in Dun-le-Poelier, France, in 1879.
Yesterday G Baskar, the principal of the engineering college, said he had been working in his cabin when he heard an explosion. ‘It was a sound like nothing I’ve ever heard before,’ he said. ‘There was no smell at all, no fire, nothing.’
Government officials at first suspected the blast was caused by explosives accidentally left after building work.
But a district official, who asked not be named, said: ‘When no evidence of explosive material was found, we moved to the theory that it might be a meteorite.
‘It is not confirmed yet as samples need to be analysed.’ A team from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics is expected to visit the site today.
However, Sujan Sengupta, an associate professor at the institute, said there was ‘extremely little possibility’ of a small meteorite falling to earth and harming anyone.
And Simon Goodwin, an astrophysics expert at Sheffield University, said meteorite deaths were rare because the rocks usually burn up when passing through the Earth’s atmosphere, land in the ocean or hit remote areas.