Naveen Shekharappa Gyanagoudar, a fourth-year Indian medical student at Kharkiv National Medical University in Ukraine, was killed when he stepped out of a bunker to buy food from a supermarket just 30 metres away early on Tuesday morning, one of his classmates said.

Naveen hailed from Chalageri in Karnataka’s Haveri district, around 340km from Bangalore.

Naveen’s classmate Srikanth told a Kannada channel from the bunker that they were part of a nine-member group of Indian students who were holed up in the shelter since shelling intensified in the area a few days ago.

The area was under curfew from 3pm on Monday to 6am on Tuesday. Naveen had stepped out around 7.45am, assuming it was safe to go out and buy food. “I was asleep when he left. So I called him at 7.58am to check where he was. He told me he was out to buy food and asked me to transfer some money to his account, which I did,” said a distraught Srikanth, who too is from Karnataka.

“I called him again after 10 minutes when he didn’t return, but got no response. I kept trying for another 30 minutes before someone who spoke in the local language answered his phone. As I am not fluent in the language, I handed over the phone to a Ukrainian national who was in our bunker. Another Ukranian who spoke English told me that my friend has died,” said Srikanth.

“This is so shocking. Until yesterday we were confident of moving to safety, but today I lost my classmate. I don’t know how his parents will take this,” he said.

In Chalageri, hundreds rushed to console Naveen’s family and lamented that the boy would have been saved had the Indian authorities evacuated the students in time.

Chief minister and BJP leader Basavaraj Bommai, who spoke to the boy’s father and assured all help in bringing back the body, later told reporters that two other students from the same village had been injured in the shelling.

“He was killed in a shelling. Two other boys from the same village were injured in the incident,” Bommai told reporters.

The chief minister, who already knew Naveen’s family, said efforts were on to repatriate the body at the earliest. “I have spoken to the minister of external affairs and asked if we can recover the body. Since it is a war zone, we don’t know what condition the body is in and whether we can repatriate it soon,” said Bommai, who had sought the help of the Prime Minister’s Office to get more details.

A source at the state home ministry told The Telegraph that 49 of the 494 students from the state had been evacuated from Ukraine while another 30 had returned before the war started.