The Nottingham minibus driver, known as Benny, died when his vehicle was involved in a collision with two lorries.<\/p>\n
52-year-old Joseph was reportedly driving a group of Indian visitors from Nottingham to Wembley, North London, when the incident occurred.<\/p>\n
Two lorry drivers, Ryszard Masierak, 31, and David Wagstaff, 53, were charged with eight counts of death caused by dangerous driving in connection with the crash.<\/p>\n
On Sunday morning, a service was held in Lenton, Nottingham, in memory of Mr Joseph, who was originally from the state of Kerala in India.<\/p>\n
Conducting the service at St. Paul\u2019s Church was Father Biju Joseph who said, “It’s so sad and we’re praying to God for his soul and his family.<\/p>\n
“People are really shocked, he was such a good friend. He was like a brother to me.”<\/p>\n
Mr Joseph leaves his wife and two children, a 19-year-old son, who studies at University, and a 15-year-old daughter, who recently achieved outstanding GCSE results. Father Joseph confirmed the family were told of his death on Saturday morning.<\/p>\n
He said the service was a \u201cgreat relief\u201d for the family.<\/p>\n
According to friend Alex Daniel, Mr Joseph, who ran ABC Travels, was a \u201cgreat leader\u201d within the Indian community in Nottingham.<\/p>\n
“I’m not surprised by the amount of people who came [to the service]. We got calls from across the country showing concerns for the family,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
“He would go an extra mile to help anyone in need,” said Manu Zachariah, who described Mr Joseph as a best friend who was like a brother to him.<\/p>\n
He added, “He loved company of friends. He was sports enthusiast and active cultural leader of our community. He was positive thinker and wanted everyone to improve.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cyriac Joseph was among the eight people killed in a major incident on the M1 last Saturday. The Nottingham minibus driver, known as Benny, died when his vehicle was involved in a collision with two lorries. 52-year-old Joseph was reportedly driving a group of Indian visitors from Nottingham to Wembley, North London, when the incident […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":23804,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}