Indian police have arrested four top members of the construction company building a highway overpass in Kolkata that collapsed this week, killing 27 people.
An IVRCL architect, chief engineer, senior general manager and assistant general manager involved in the project have all been charged with attempted murder and mischief, Kolkata police official Debasish Boral told CNN on Saturday.
This development isn’t entirely unexpected, given that authorities had already announced charges generally against IVRCL and that 12 officials from the company were brought in for questioning.
It also comes the same day that rescuers pulled three more bodies from the rubble, according to police official S. Ghosh.
Two days earlier, massive chunks of steel and concrete buried moving cars and pedestrians, prompting a frantic rescue operation. Residents, authorities and an army of hard-hatted rescue crews toiled under bright lights, looking for survivors under slabs of debris.
‘God’s act’
IVRCL did not immediately respond to the charges, but an executive said it was not his construction company’s fault.
“It’s nothing but a God’s act,” K. Panduranga Rao said, CNN IBN reported Thursday. “So far in 27 years, we have constructed several number of bridges … it never happened.”
But this is not the first time bridges or overpasses have collapsed in India.
A bridge fell on an express train in Bhagalpur in 2006, killing dozens of passengers. Three years later, 30 workers died when a scaffolding on a bridge in Kota crashed down.
And in eastern Kolkata, not far from Thursday’s collapse, an overpass collapsed three years ago, sending a truck careening into a canal. The people inside were rescued.
It’s unclear whether IVRCL had any connection to those incidents.
Parents killed
Ahhiskek Kanoi’s parents died in Thursday’s collapse. Their burned bodies, he said, were found in “very bad” condition.
“I couldn’t even recognize them,” Kanoi said.
Eighty other people were pulled out, injured but alive, the National Disaster Management Authority said.