Delhi fire: Scenes of despair at mortuary; police collect evidence at site

Relatives sobbed outside the mortuary of the Maulana Azad Medical College here waiting for the bodies of their loved ones as police investigation into the Anaj Mandi fire gathered momentum on Monday.

A court sent the property owner, Rehan, and manager of the building, Furkan to 14-day police custody. Metropolitan Magistrate Manoj Kumar accepted the police's plea seeking their custodial interrogation.

Police had arrested the two and registered a case under sections 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 285 (negligent conduct with respect to fire) of the IPC. The case was transferred to the Crime Branch.

On Monday morning, a fire broke out in the same building where the blaze had erupted on Sunday killing 43 people, Delhi Fire Service officials said.

Some material stacked inside the building had caught fire. However, the blaze was brought under control within 20 minutes, they said.

At the site of Sunday's blaze in which 43 people were killed and 16 injured, the Crime Branch of Delhi Police collected evidence from the building using 3D laser scan technology in order to reconstruct the incident of fire for investigation.

A team from the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) also visited the site and collected samples from the four-storey building that didn't have fire safety clearance but housed a number of illegal manufacturing units and had stored flammable material such as cardboard boxes, plastic sheets and rexine.

This is the second time that the Delhi Police is using the 3D laser scan technology for investigation.

The police had used the same technology to probe the massive fire in February in Karol Bagh's Hotel Arpit Palace that killed 17 people.

There was chaos outside the mortuary at the hospital where the autopsies of those killed in the Anaj Mandi fire incident were performed, as family members waited to be handed over the bodies of their loved ones.

Confusion prevailed among the victims' families about how the bodies will be transported back home, with most of them opposing the government's arrangement of sending them back to their native villages in special coaches by train