Flyover collapse: 3 officials held on murder charges, 24 dead

Kolkata, Apr 1: A day after an under-construction flyover collapsed in the city leaving at least 24 dead, the police tonight 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 IVRCL's Kolkata office for questioning and later arrested three of them, a senior Kolkata Police officer said.

The three - Assistant General Manager Mallikaarjun, Assistant Manager Debjyoti Manjumdar and Structure Manager Pradip Kumar Saha - were arrested under IPC sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) and others.

They will be produced before a court tomorrow. Seven other officials of the company are still detained, the officer said, adding that a team of Kolkata Police has left for Hyderabad to meet IVRCL top bosses. Police had yesterday 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 yesterday. It also ordered immediate inspection of the remaining portion of the flyover to ascertain its stability and safety, an official release said.

About a 60-metre-long stretch of the 2.2 km flyover under construction crashed down yesterday afternoon on a congested road intersection here. 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.

PTI