Lyubomir Paskalev was killed in a collision on the North Orbital Road after he veered into the side of a vehicle in the adjacent lane.
An inquest in February 2017 heard that Paskalev had been smoking cannabis and had more than twice the legal driving limit in his blood when he swerved from a closed lane of the dual carriageway into the live lane, colliding with a Ford Focus driven by Kevin Flanagan. Multiple witnesses described him as riding erratically and seeming “totally oblivious to everything around him”.
Flanagan had been talking on the phone to his partner in the car behind his via Bluetooth at the time of the incident, but said he had not been distracted and had not seen Paskalev, who had no lights on his bicycle and was wearing dark clothing. Deputy coroner Geoffrey Danbury described the collision as “entirely unavoidable”.