Flyover tragedy: Arrest warrant issued against IVRCL chief

Bankshall Court on Friday issued an arrest warrant against S Reddy, the Chairman and Managing Director of the construction company IVRCL, in connection with the Vivekananda Flyover collapse tragedy.

The state’s counsel submitted before the court that a team comprising of senior officers from the Kolkata Police went to the office of the construction company in Hyderabad. They had searched for Reddy but he was not found. The team went there to arrest the senior official of the company. Failing to find him, the police officers had to return to Kolkata. On this backdrop, the state’s counsel pleaded before the court to issue an arrest warrant against Reddy.

It may be recalled that a portion of the flyover collapsed at the intersection of Vivekananda Road and Rabindra Sarani killing 26 people leaving several others injured on March 31. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had rushed to the spot cancelling all her prescheduled election campaigns in the districts and supervised the rescue work. Jawans of the Indian Army and National Disaster Response Force were also called in to carry out the rescue work along with the Kolkata Police’s rank and file. It took more than 24 hours to rescue all the trapped people and to extricate bodies of the people on whom the portion of the flyover had fallen.

The Kolkata Police had initiated a probe into the incident the same day the incident had taken place. All three offices of IVRCL in the city were sealed and their officials were arrested following marathon interrogation.

Police had arrested total 10 officials of the construction company in the past few days. All were remanded in the custody of the police when they were produced before the court.

The officials were produced before the court on Friday. Mallika Arjun, Senior Assistant General Manager, Pradip Kumar Saha, Manager (Structural), Debojyoti Majumder, Assistant Manager (Administration) and engineer Tanmoy Shil were remanded in judicial custody till April 29. 

Gopal Krishnamurti, director (operation), SK Ratnam, DGM (operation), Niloy Roy, Ranjit Bhattacharya and two site engineers Shyamal Manna and Bidyut Manna were remanded in the custody of the police till 

April 18. The counsels of the officials of IVRCL pleaded for their bail. The state’s counsel had objected the bail plea as the investigation may get affected.