MUMBAI: It has been more than a month since the FIR was filed in the fatal
Sunrise Hospital
fire at Bhandup, but there have been no arrests yet, the families of the victims complained to director general of police (DGP) Sanjay Pandey on Monday.
Pandey has asked the
Mumbai police commissioner
to carry out a thorough probe into the incident.
On March 25, a major fire broke out in Dreams Mall and spread to Sunrise Hospital, a dedicated Covid facility, located on the third floor. Eleven bodies were found and over 70 patients rescued. Two days later, Bhandup police booked six people—Rakesh Wadhwan, Sarang Wadhwan and Deepak Shirke of HDIL that owns the mall, and Amitsingh Trehan,
Nikhita Trehan
and Sweety Jain of Privilege Healthcare Services that managed Sunrise Hospital—under IPC 304 for culpable homicide not
amounting to murder
.
“But till date, there has been no action from the police or any other authorities. We have urged the DGP to conduct a fair and fast probe and give us justice. Even the BMC has not done any investigation,” said Ashish Das, who lost his father Govindlal Das in the fire. BJP corporators Vinod Mishra, Prabhakar Shinde, Bhalchandra Shirsat and MLA Mihir Kotecha were also part of the delegation that met the state DGP.
Sunrise Hospital had started functioning as a Covid facility in October 2020 with a provisional occupation certificate (OC).
“The BMC has not carried out any departmental inquiry yet,” said Mishra. “The provisional OC was given via a WhatsApp group. The civic building proposal department’s report was overlooked and the provisional OC not revoked in time. We have raised all these points before the DGP and he has asked the police commissioner to carry out a thorough probe,” he added.
The civic department had raised a red flag in August last year stating that the grant of provisional OC must be reviewed and that it wasn’t proper to de-link the irregularities of Dreams Mall from Sunrise Hospital. However, despite the detailed report, the BMC had neither reviewed or revoked the provisional OC then. It was finally revoked after the fatal fire. “There must be a criminal probe against all BP department officials who handled the file. If there is no action now, we will take legal action along with the victim’s families,” Mishra warned.