Victims of Salman Khan's Hit-and-Run Still Waiting to Get Paid

A decade after the fact, the victims of the Salman Khan hit-and-run case were still waiting to be paid.

On September 28, 2002, Khan's Toyota Land Cruiser mounted a pavement outside a Bandra bakery in Mumbai in the early hours, running over five pavement dwellers. One man died; the others were seriously injured. Khan was arrested, charged, and released on bail — and then the case began its long crawl through the courts.

The human cost kept compounding. Ravindra Patil, the police constable assigned as Khan's bodyguard that night and the prosecution's key witness, stood by his statement that the actor was driving and had been drinking. Patil was later sidelined from the force, fell ill with tuberculosis, and died in 2007 — a witness's ruin that became its own scandal.

By October 2012, the criminal trial was still grinding on, and the victims' compensation claims were still unresolved — a decade of court dates for families who had lost their breadwinner to a film star's car. The case would eventually reach a verdict in 2015 (a conviction, then an acquittal on appeal), but that autumn the story was simpler and sadder: the famous move on, and the forgotten wait.

This article reports on the case as it stood in 2012; it makes no finding of guilt.