Roof collapses at city rly police station

A heavy wooden roof came crashing down inside one of the lockups at the Bengaluru city railway police station on Thursday morning.

Nobody was injured as the police had taken out the two suspects in the lockup for breakfast just before the roof collapsed. The incident occurred a month after the South Western Railway (SWR) building section certified the structure that houses the police station on platform number 6 as “strong enough for a few more decades”.

A railway police officer told Deccan Herald: “Our men had detained two youths, aged around 25 and hailing from Dharwad and Magadi, in a mobile theft case on Wednesday night. The two were kept in lockup number one for questioning. The duo were taken out for breakfast around 8.25 am and within minutes the wooden roof, which weighed around 250 kg, collapsed.”

“I rushed inside the lockup after I heard a thud and the cell was filled with debris,” he said. The railway police would have been in trouble had the roof fallen on the two suspects. They would have surely been killed in the incident and it would have amounted to lockup death, said the police.

The SWR subordinate staff reportedly hushed up the matter and they directed the railway police to remain tight-lipped about the incident. They rushed to the spot and cleared the debris.

Sanjiv Agarwal, Divisional Railway Manager, Bengaluru, South Western Railway, was not even informed about the incident until evening.

“A small false ceiling collapsed inside the lockup, where there is no light. It’s actually the false ceiling and no part of the wall collapsed,” Agarwal told Deccan Herald. “Our staff regularly conduct check-ups and there is nothing wrong in the building,” he said.

A police officer said, “A team from the SWR visited our police station in March after the tragedy at the Hubballi railway station. They certified that the structure was constructed by the British about 120 years ago and it could be used for many more decades.”

The police claimed that their repeated pleas for a new building with the SWR higher-ups have fallen on deaf ears.

Six people were killed and at least 15 injured when the building, more than a century-old, which housed the SWR parcel office and the railway police station, in Hubballi collapsed on February 8.

The incident at the Bengaluru City railway police station has raised serious concerns about the safety of many railway police stations as they are housed in old structures.