India, March 20 -- An early-morning drive to catch the sunrise in Lonavala turned tragic for three Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) students who were killed in a high-speed crash on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway on Thursday morning.

The three friends had spent the night watching a movie in the Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai before heading to Lonavala. Around 8.35 am, on their way back to Mumbai, their Volkswagen Polo rammed into a container truck while trying to overtake it near the Bhatan tunnel on the expressway. The impact was so severe that the car flipped multiple times and was reduced to a mangled heap, police officers said.

The accident was first reported by a Shivneri bus driver, who alerted the highway traffic police....