A 52-year-old renal patient in Murshidabad’s Salar breathed her last inside an ambulance that was allegedly stopped by drivers of other ambulances on Monday night.

The incident comes close on the heels of a migrant worker being forced to carry the body of his five-month-old son in a bag and board a bus from Siliguri to reach his village in North Dinajpur as he could not pay what private ambulance drivers had in mind.

The alleged perpetrators of the Murshidabad case are members of an ambulance union, who allegedly run a monopoly of plying patients from Salar block hospital, where patient Chand Tara Bibi was brought for treatment.

Bibi's sons Shakib and Asif Sheikh had ferried her from their Madhaipur home to Salar block hospital around 11.30pm on Monday. About an hour later, they were ready to take their mother to the Burdwan hospital. But as they were boarding the ambulance that they arrived in, three men stopped them, Shakib said.

“Doctors at the Salar hospital referred my mother to a medical college and hospital, so we were taking her to Burdwan. I knew the ambulance driver who brought us from Madhaipur to Salar, so he charged us less,” said Shakib Sheikh, one of Bibi's two sons. "But three drivers of the ambulance union at the hospital tried to force us to take our mother in one of their vehicles at a much higher rate."

The trio reportedly said they wouldn't allow any ambulance from outside to carry patients. The brothers tried to reason with them and managed to get the ambulance out of the hospital compound, Shakib said. However, the three men on bikes followed the ambulance and stopped it near Salar market.

“They vandalised the ambulance with our ailing mother inside it. They thrashed me, my brother and our driver as well,” Shakib said.

Amid all this, the brothers realised their mother had died.

On Tuesday morning, the brothers lodged a complaint with Salar police, accusing the three men of killing their mother. An FIR was filed by Sandip Sanyal, the CMOH of Murshidabad, who ordered a departmental inquiry.

Sources at the block hospital said the scuffle around Bibi might have caused a stroke.

Local MLA Humayun Kabir said what the three ambulance drivers did was immoral and illegal and a nexus of private ambulances was prevalent in other hospitals in the district as well.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee condemned the incident. She said police had started probing the matter and arrested two persons.