TEAM HERALD
PANJIM: All the 11 accused in the year-old Ruby Residency building collapse case, including senior government officials, will be charged for culpable homicide on Friday.
After two postponements, Crime Branch is set to chargesheet the case before the Margao Sessions Court.
“The delay was because the officers were on Zilla Panchayat election duty. The case will be chargesheeted tomorrow (Friday),” Crime Branch Superintendent of Police Karthik Kashyap told Herald.
The voluminous chargesheet against the accused comprises 2,600 pages including forensic reports and statements of over 125 witnesses. While nine persons named in the FIR were arrested during the course of the investigation, two former directors of Bharat Developers and Realtors Pvt Ltd – Pradip Singh Birring and Jagdeep Kumar Sehgal – were arrested from Vashi (Mumbai) on January 16, this year.
The accused are facing serious criminal and corruption charges after the under construction building at Chawdi, Canacona crashed killing 31 labourers, on January 4, 2014. The builders, who had been on the run for over a year, have been booked under section 174-A of the Indian Penal Code for dishonouring the court by refusing to respond to repeated summons.
The Crime Branch sleuths’ recent admission that Interpol’s tip-off claiming that Birring was present in Manchester, was false, will not figure in the chargesheet. Sources revealed that Interpol failed to respond to Crime Branch’s three reminders that sought clarification to the information shared with the Indian authorities about Birring, who denied he had travelled abroad since the occurrence of the incident.
“After his (Birring’s) claim in the court that he never moved out of the country since the incident day, Crime Branch decided to verify the information and wrote to the Interpol seeking details. There was no response from them following which we sent three reminders during this period but these too have not been reverted,” one of the investigation team members said.
In its written communiqué in May 2014, the Interpol, through the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), had informed Crime Branch that its officials located Birring in Manchester subsequent to which the Crime Branch began the process to extradite him to India.
