Ryszard Masierak was earlier convicted at the end of a trial at Reading Crown Court. (File photo))
Highlights
- Truck driver found guilty of causing death of 8 Indians in an accident
- Court in the UK convicted Ryszard Masierak, 31, a Polish national
- Truck driver was drunk twice the legal limit
A truck driver was found guilty of killing eight Indians in one of Britain's worst road accidents last year. A 31-year-old Polish man was involved in a car crash with a minibus in which eight Indians were travelling and another truck in southern England on August 26 last year. Among the Indians killed were IT professionals from Wipro .
A UK court on Tuesday said the truck driver was two times over the legal drink-drive limit and had stopped his truck in the inside lane of a highway.
The driver of the ill-fated minibus was from Kerala and was based in Nottingham. The 52-year-old man had been hired to drive his seven Indian passengers from Nottingham to London to join a European holiday tour group when they met with the fatal accident.
The trial was told that the car driver, identified as Ryszard Masierak, had stopped for 12 minutes in the slow lane of the highway just before the crash. His truck blocked the road, forcing others to slow down before moving around him.
As Cyriac Joseph, the minibus driver from Kerala, waited with his hazard lights on for a chance to go around the truck, a second truck smashed into the back of the van, forcing it to crash into and then go under Polish man's truck, the court was told.
The Indians from Nottingham's Malayali community and their relatives were Panneerselvam Annamalai, Rishi Ranjeev Kumar, Vivek Baskaran, Lavanyalakshmi Seetharaman, Karthikeyan Pugalur Ramasubramanian, Subramaniyan Arachelvan and Tamilmani Arachelvan. The group was on its way to London to catch a bus to Disneyland in Paris.