Angry at being asked not to smoke in public, a ‘drunk lawyer’ allegedly rammed his car into the motorcycle of a 21-year-old photography student near the AIIMS Trauma Centre in south Delhi on Sunday.

The student, Gurpreet Singh, who was in coma since Sunday, succumbed to his injuries on Wednesday. The lawyer has been arrested. Police had initially booked the accused, Rohit Krishna Mahanta, for rash driving and causing hurt by an act of negligence, and he was released on bail. But after the victim died, the police again arrested Mahanta and slapped charges of murder on him.

The accused lawyer is working under a standing counsel of the Assam government. The victim’s family alleged that police had initially tried to ignore the true facts of the case and tried to pass it off as a simple case of accident, which resulted in the lawyer getting the bail. However, once the victim’s friend, who was also injured in the accident, narrated the incident on Wednesday and the case was highlighted by media, Delhi police booked the lawyer for murder.

Singh, a native of Bathinda in Punjab, had been pursuing a photography course from Delhi College of Photography in north Delhi. He lived with his classmate Maninder Singh in a rented accommodation in Shahbad Dairy. To shoot a documentary on the lives of outstation patients and their relatives, the duo visited the AIIMS in the early hours of Sunday. Once done with their work at around 3.30am, they had decided to have paranthas outside the hospital.

The accused was smoking in the pubic and when they request him not to smoke the matter turned into verbal abuse and death threats. After that, the two friends reportedly picked up their Bullet motorcycle and left. The man who were fighting with them a minute ago chase the duo and hit them intentionally. As Maninder sought an auto driver’s help to move his friend to the trauma centre nearby, public gathered at the spot and thrashed Mahanta, a native of Assam and a resident of south Delhi’s Defence Colony.

“His medical examination showed he was drunk. He had threatened Gurpreet after an argument and later he followed Gurpreet’s bike and rammed it from behind,” said Chinmoy Biswal, additional DCP (south).