A gang of four armed men tried to hijack a truck after gunning down the vehicle’s cleaner and stabbing the driver to injure him at Jemco near the Lafarge Cement company in Telco police station area in the wee hours of Saturday.

The men drove the truck with the cleaner’s body and the bleeding driver up to 8km to reach Sakchi L-town area, but had to flee when a biker saw the blood and informed the police.

The four men scrambled out of the truck and before the police arrived. The police rushed both the men to MGM Medical College and Hospital, where doctors on emergency duty declared the cleaner Krishna Yadav brought dead.

Injured driver Upendra Yadav, 25, who is also Krishna’s younger brother, has been admitted to MGM hospital, where his condition is said to be stable.

The ghastly incident took place around 2am. A hunt for the four men, described by Upendra, is on, but so far no headway has been made.

The truck that was hijacked. Picture by Animesh Sengupta

The police have sent Krishna’s body to MGM college mortuary for an autopsy and kept the truck on Sakchi police station premises.

A case of loot and murder have been registered against unidentified persons.

Injured Upendra, a resident of Uttar Pradesh, who was well enough to speak, said from the hospital that the brothers used to ferry cement bags from Lafarge to various parts of the country.

“We were waiting for the booking of the cement consignment at night, a normal practice. At 2am, someone asked for key of the truck from my brother. When he refused, the man fired a shot at him. Another man who was standing with two others attacked me with a knife. I got a deep gash near my neck. Then, he grabbed the driver’s seat and drove towards Sakchi even as I bled profusely. The other three men were also in the truck,” Upendra said.

He added that it was providential that the biker saw them in the dark. “The truck was not giving a pass to the biker. He might have sensed something was amiss and overtook the truck. He saw blood and started calling the police. All of a sudden, the criminals came out of the truck and ran,” Upendra said.

City SP Subhash Chandra Jat said the bid of the armed gang to hijack the truck

failed when the biker alerted police near the L-town gate of Sakchi around 2.15am. “We are probing into the case and are trying to nab the criminals,” he said.