Team News Riveting
New Delhi, March 1
Mobile phone helped to identify Naveen Shekharappa Gyanagoudar, a fourth year MBBS student at Kharkiv National Medical University, who was killed in Russian shelling in Ukraine today.
Naveen, the first Indian to fell victim in the on-going Russia-Ukraine conflict, hailed from Haveri district in Karnataka. Twenty-one-year-old Naveen was standing in a queue at a supermarket in Kharkiv, Ukraine, to buy food, when Russian bombarded. He was near the Governor House in Kharkiv when the incident took place today.
His friend told a news channel that Naveen and he were in the same bunker for the last six days. “I slept around 3:30 AM, so I could not accompany Naveen around 6 AM to get some snacks. We have been surviving on biscuits and chocolates for the past three days,” he said.
Naveen had gone to a nearby supermarket, which is just 50 meters away from the bunker. Around 7.50 am, Naveen messaged one of their friends named Srikanth, to send money to him as he was short. The friend called him again at 8:10 am, and an unknown person sent a message from Naveen’s phone in Russian saying “he is no more.”
The messenger wrote that the owner of the phone had been sent to the morgue as he was killed in the blast.
Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second-largest city, after the capital Kyiv, and is on the eastern side of Ukraine. The rescue efforts are currently concentrated on the western borders of the country, which is under attack from neighbour Russia. According to students in Kharkiv, there are at least 3,000 Indians in the city and they are running out of essential supplies and money to buy supplies.
Shekharappa Gyanagoudar, father of Indian student Naveen who was killed in Ukraine’s Kharkiv asks Govt to bring back his mortal remains. He asks Govt to also look at hefty donations that medical colleges demand, forcing Indian students to take admission abroad.
MEA officials have reached out to Naveen’s family in Karnataka and informed them that his body has been transferred to a morgue. However, an MEA official also told the family that they cannot give any assurance on whether the body can be brought back to India.
