Bengaluru cops grill BMRCL engineers, contractor firm reps

Cops said further course of action in the probe would be decided only after all the nine suspects were questioned

Police on Thursday grilled three BMRCL engineers and as many representatives of NCC Ltd over the metro pier
accident.

The six were questioned for several hours and have been summoned for questioning again on Friday.

The six were named in the FIR that the Govindapura police registered following the death of a woman techie and her toddler son after an under-construction metro pier collapsed along the Outer Ring Road in HBR Layout on January 10.

Bheemashankar S Guled, Deputy Commissioner of Police (East), said further course of action in the probe would be decided only after all the nine suspects were questioned. He declined to give more details, saying the investigation is still in the initial stage.

Hyderabad-based NCC Ltd is the contractor for the 38-km KR Puram-Airport metro line where the tragedy occurred. The company has been named accused number 1 while its director Chaitanya is accused number 3. The company’s joint director Prabhakar, senior project manager Mathai, project manager Vikash Singh and supervisor Lakshmipathi are other suspects.

The suspects from BMRCL are deputy chief engineer Venkatesh Shetty, executive engineer Mahesh Bandekari and junior engineer Jaffer Sadiq. They are accused numbers 7, 8 and 9.

Police went by a BMRCL list in naming the suspects.

Police sources said Chaitanya and Mathai didn’t appear for questioning but Prabhakar, Singh and Lakshmipathi did. All three BMRCL engineers appeared for questioning.

BMRCL boss Anjum Parwez said while a notice had been issued to NCC Ltd, further action would be taken only after the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) submitted a report. “We will check which clause of the contract has been violated and then decide on the action,” he
told DH.

The IISc team will visit the accident scene two more times before submitting a report, which is expected in 8-10 days.

Prof Chandra Kishen J M, from the civil engineering department at the Indian Institute of Science, which has been asked to do an “independent” inquiry into the metro accident, said prima facie, the supporting structure was inadequate giving way for the reinforcement cage
to fall.

“The design of the supporting cables was inadequate. The diameter of cables holding an 18-metre reinforcement cage was inadequate. The angle at which they were supporting the cage was also not good,” he told DH.