More than 24 hours after a five-storey PG accommodation collapsed in Delhi's Satya Niketan, claiming seven lives and injuring five others, police detained the building owner Hariram Gupta from Bhiwadi near Gurugram following an extensive manhunt.
Earlier in the day, Delhi Police had issued a lookout circular (LOC) against Gupta and obtained his passport details as part of efforts to trace him. Following the LOC, several police teams were deployed, with three to four teams conducting raids at suspected hideouts across the city and beyond.
Police also reached Sector 23, where Hariram Paints and Hardware, owned by Gupta, had remained locked for the past two days. Local residents said Gupta had been running the shop for around 15 years and was considered one of the prominent hardware traders in the area. Neighbours also claimed the Gupta family owns several houses in Sector 23 and Palam Vihar.
The decades-old structure housing the boys' PG accommodation, Hostel Daze, came down on Sunday while repair work was underway, turning a student neighbourhood near Delhi University's South Campus into the site of a devastating tragedy. The building stood in a densely packed area surrounded by Motilal Nehru College, Atma Ram Sanatan Dharm College and Sri Venkateswara College, a locality long popular among students seeking accommodation close to campus.
Search and rescue operations are continuing at the collapse site, with teams from the Delhi Police, Delhi Fire Service, National Disaster Response Force, Delhi Disaster Management Authority and other agencies combing through the rubble for those still unaccounted for.
Locals have alleged that water had accumulated in the basement over days of heavy rain, potentially weakening the foundation. The exact cause of the collapse, however, remains under investigation.
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) is now facing mounting questions about construction and building safety in the locality, where several residential properties have been converted into PG accommodations. The civic body has ordered the immediate sealing of all illegal construction exceeding four floors, and warned of strict action including the immediate dismissal of officials found responsible.
The collapsed Satya Niketan structure was a ground-plus-five-storey building constructed on a plot of around 55 square yards in a resettlement colony where the original permission was only for a ground-plus-one structure.
