Accident Victims Died When Onlookers Posed For Selfies At Crash Site Instead Of Answering Their Pleas For Help

In a truly bizarre and heart-wrenching incident, people in India preferred to take selfies with three road accident victims instead of giving them first aid or taking them to the hospital, leading to their deaths, Times of India reports.

The incident took place in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, where three concrete factory laborers who worked in the neighboring state of Gujarat had come to hire more laborers. At around 2 p.m., their motorbike was hit by a school bus in a lethal clash. The bus driver reportedly drove away.

Severely injured, the three men lay sprawled in a pool of blood and while bystanders quickly circled them, nobody helped them.

Instead, photos and videos circulating on social media showed that young men at the crash site took selfies with the injured, and a few people also filmed them. While one of the victims died immediately, two others writhed in pain on the road for more than half an hour, before finally bleeding to their deaths.

Local police condemned the actions of the bystanders, saying they should have rendered help to the injured men. There was more than enough time for at least two of them to be transferred to a nearby hospital, in which case their lives could have been saved.

(Warning: Some viewers may find the pictures disturbing.)

Barmer: Three people who met with a road accident, succumbed to injuries even as onlookers clicked pictures and selfies instead of helping them. #Rajasthan (10.7.18) pic.twitter.com/h83Ejv0zw0

— ANI (@ANI) July 11, 2018

India is infamous for its selfie obsession, with a study by scholars from Carnegie Mellon University and Indraprastha Institute of Information Delhi showing that as many as 127 selfie deaths took place within a period of six months in 2014 in India. To put that into context, during the same period, the United States recorded eight selfie-related deaths.

Moreover, as well as the obsession that young Indians have for selfies, the country has also witnessed several incidents where bystanders have chosen to abdicate their duty to attend to accident victims. To this end, the Delhi government in India had to introduce a “Good Samaritan Policy” which incentivized those who helped road accident victims with cash rewards.

Despite that, the general apathetic mood of people witnessing accidents in the country remains deeply troubling, with the latest selfie episode perhaps marking a new low for India.

As ABC News reports, it is not only members of the public who often display such insensitivity, even the police are guilty of it. Earlier this year, two teenagers in India who had met a traffic accident bled to their deaths after two officers brawled among themselves as to who’d wash the car from the blood stains in case they drove the teens to the hospital.