Five killed in head-on collision on Assam's National Highway 15

Five men have died after their microvan collided head-on with a commercial truck on National Highway 15 in Assam’s Sonitpur district late on Friday night.

The crash occurred at around 11:30 pm near a petrol pump in the Balipara area, specifically at a spot known as Meat Supply in Tubukijhar, within the jurisdiction of the Rangapara Police Station. The five occupants of the Maruti Suzuki Eeco van were travelling from Tezpur towards Rangapara when the collision occurred.

According to Sonitpur Senior Superintendent of Police Barun Purkayastha, emergency responders arrived at the scene to find five critically injured men trapped inside the wrecked vehicle. Two of the men were declared dead on arrival at a nearby government hospital, while the remaining three succumbed to their injuries during treatment.

The victims have been identified as Harobinda Hazoary, 38, Pranjal Bania, 39, Sanjay Mech, 39, Papu Borah, 45, and Nayan Swargiary, 45. All five were residents of the nearby Ghoramari Batabari area.

The force of the collision was severe enough to throw the van off the road and into a deep roadside ditch. Local residents who witnessed the crash reported hearing a massive impact from their homes, describing both the truck and the van as travelling at high speeds before they collided.

Initial investigations by the police suggest that the driver of the Eeco van lost control of the vehicle, causing it to drift across the central line into the oncoming lane, directly into the path of the truck. Local emergency services also recovered several bottles of alcohol from the wreckage of the van during the rescue operation, according to reporting by the Hindusthan Samachar news agency.

The driver of the truck fled the scene immediately after the crash and has not yet been found. Police have taken both damaged vehicles into custody as part of their investigation and are actively searching for the driver to help establish the exact sequence of events.

The bodies of the five victims have been sent to the Sonitpur Civil Hospital for post-mortem examinations.

The collision briefly blocked traffic on the busy stretch of National Highway 15, but normal vehicle movement was restored once emergency services cleared the wreckage and debris from the road.

While the Assam government has actively promoted road safety campaigns over recent years—with Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma noting a decline in overall road deaths—serious accidents remain a persistent danger. State figures show that nearly 4,000 road accidents have been recorded across Assam so far this year, resulting in hundreds of deaths.