Two young international students from India have been identified as the victims of a traffic accident that occurred near the Canadian capital of Ottawa last week.
The mishap took place on May 12 in a single car crash at around 5.30 am on Friday morning, according to the Ontario Provincial Police.
Based on information from fellow students and Indo-Canadian community members, the victims were identified by the network Prime Asia as 21-year-old Balwinder Singh and 22-year-old Sachin Chugh, both from Punjab. They were both residents of the town of Brampton in the Greater Toronto Area or GTA and were traveling to Ottawa when the tragic accident on Highway 417 claimed their lives.
Chugh was a student at Canadore College, while Singh was at Alpha College.
Their funerals will be held in Brampton on Thursday and their remains are expected to be transported back to India on Friday. A family friend set up an online fundraiser for Chugh for returning the remains to India.
According to a report in the outlet CTV News on the day of the mishap, Ottawa Fire Services said the vehicle the young students were travelling in was found upended about 120 metres away from the road on a neighbouring field.
The two occupants trapped in the vehicle were extricated by fire department personnel but were subsequently declared dead at the spot by paramedics attending at the scene.
This isn’t the first accident in Canada to claim multiple lives of students from India. In March last year, a fatal accident in southern Ontario claimed the lives of five international students from India.
There were a total of eight occupants of the van involved in that tragedy; the five deceased, two who were injured and treated at a nearby hospital and another person who was outside the vehicle and was unharmed. Most of the students, seven of whom were from Punjab and one from Haryana, were students in Montreal but residents in the Greater Toronto Area township of Brampton.
