Flyover collapse: 3 officials held

A day after an under-construction flyover collapsed in here leaving at least 24 dead, the police on Friday arrested three top officials of a Hyderabad-based company which was building the flyover and slapped murder charges on them.

Earlier the police had detained 10 officials of the construction company’s, IVRCLs, Kolkata office for questioning and later arrested three of them, a senior Kolkata Police officer said.

Assistant general-manager Mallikaarjun, assistant manager Debjyoti Majumdar and structure manager Pradip Kumar Saha were arrested under Sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) and others of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). They will be produced before a court on Saturday.

Seven other company officials are still detained, the officer said, adding that a team of Kolkata Police has left for Hyderabad to meet IVRCL top bosses.

The police had on Thursday registered a case against the construction firm under Sections 304, 308 and 407 of the IPC and sealed its local office.

The state government also suspended a chief engineer and an executive engineer of the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority who were involved in the construction of the flyover pending completion of the probe which the government ordered on Thursday.

It also ordered immediate inspection of the remaining portion of the flyover to ascertain its stability and safety, an official release said.

Forensic experts visited the site and collected samples of materials used for the construction for examination.

A day after an official of IVRCL dubbed the flyover collapse as an “act of god”, IVRCL’s legal team head P Sita said: “It is an accident”. She also did not rule out sabotage and referred to a media report which said there could have been a bomb blast.

“An act of god was just an expression only to describe that it is under no one’s control,” she said in Hyderabad.