‘Stood in balcony with a cloth around my mouth… kept calling out to my family’: Teen recalls Delhi’s Shahdara fire that killed 4
Delhi Police arrest landlord, his son for negligence
3 min read
Delhi Fire Services Chief Atul Garg had said Friday that the fire broke out among the wipers, rubber and cutting machine. (Express File Photo)Around 5 pm on Friday, 16-year-old Radhika had just got back from tuition when someone rang the bell of her third-floor flat in Shahdara’s Mansarovar Park. When the Class XI student opened the door, she found Rachna, her neighbour from the second floor, screaming about a fire and saw the staircase filled with thick black smoke. “I panicked and told my brother Pratham and mother to rush downstairs but I couldn’t see anything… it became difficult to breathe,” she told The Indian Express.
Radhika managed to get to the balcony and wrapped a cloth hanging on the clothesline around her mouth. “I stayed there, calling out desperately to my family but I could neither hear nor see them… firefighters then came and rescued me…,” she added. Her 40-year-old mother Gauri and 17-year-old brother died in the blaze of asphyxiation, along with two others — Rachna (28) and her nine-month-old daughter Ruhi.
Radhika too sustained burn injuries on her arms and legs and was discharged from GTB Hospital on Saturday.
Radhika, who studied in a government school nearby, said her brother wanted to pursue CA after Class XII. ‘My father, Ashutosh, was out of town for a wedding… I wish my mother and brother could have been saved,” cried Radhika.
Gauri and her son Pratham were among the victims
Rachna’s husband too was not home; the fourth-floor occupants were not present at their house at the time of the incident.
Meanwhile, the Delhi Police arrested the building landlord, Bharat Singh Chauhan (75), and his son, Mohit Chauhan (25), for running a godown in the stilt parking area; they used to dump fiber sheets and wipers there, which blocked the lone staircase.
DCP (Shahdara) Surendra Choudhary said, “They have been arrested for causing the death of the four persons due to their negligence and have been booked under IPC section 304A (causing death by negligence)… they used to dump their factory material near the stairs and turned the whole ground floor into a godown… prima facie, a short circuit occurred and the fire spread rapidly through the plastic material.”
Delhi Fire Services Chief Atul Garg had said Friday that the fire broke out among the wipers, rubber and cutting machine. The landlord’s wife Prabhawati, 70, also sustained burn injuries on her leg and was discharged on Saturday.
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