Three friends found dead in car; foul play suspected

Three men in their 30s were found dead in a car on Monday night in south Delhi’s RK Puram area. While police suspect that inhaling toxic fumes led to their death, members of the victims’ families have alleged that they were poisoned.

The bodies, which showed no external injury, were sent for post-mortem, and a senior officer told Deccan Herald that the autopsy report has revealed “no struggle, no external injury and no sign of force”.

“The viscera has been preserved and its report would determine how they died,” said the officer.

Balwinder Singh, 33, and Lakshman Singh and Nishant Dutta, both 32, were close friends and had collaborated to start an event management venture barely four months ago.

Since they operated through phone and had no office, they would meet in one of their cars daily to discuss work.

Kishangarh-resident Balwinder had come down to Lakshman’s house in RK Puram on Monday evening in his Honda City car.

The vehicle was parked by the roadside in a narrow lane, and the friends had snacks and chatted.

Lakshman’s brother Daulat, who claimed to have discovered the men unconscious in the car, said he had seen the trio in the market around 7 pm and all had appeared well then. “At about 10 pm, I went to meet them and found them unconscious. All three had vomited over themselves,” he said.

Daulat’s grocery shop was located a few metres from the parked car.

A call to the police control room was made and the three were rushed to AIIMS trauma centre, where they were declared dead on arrival. Police have registered a case under Section 174 CrPc, which pertains to death by suicide, accident or under conditions that give rise to suspicion.

Daulat has ruled out the police’s suspicion that the trio died due to inhalation of carbon monoxide. “The car was parked in an open area and I found the rear window rolled down at least 5 inches,” he said.

The doors of the car were also not centrally locked, and the victims were certainly “not stuck inside”, he said.

The victims generally kept the car’s air conditioner switched on whenever they met inside the vehicle, but when Daulat saw them on Monday, the vehicle’s engine was switched off.

He pointed to a change in their routine that aroused his suspicion that there could have been another person in the car who could have “poisoned” their snacks and soft drinks.