Mumbai : 7 from Kurla college among 8 dead Fire in restraurant

Less than 250 meters from their college, seven students from a Kurla-based technical institute died in a fire that broke out in a Chinese food joint Friday afternoon.
According to the police, as many as eight persons died in the incident, and seven of them were from the Don Bosco Institute of Technology (DBIT) in Kurla. The eighth was a design engineer who had his office nearby.
The deceased are Sarjil Sheikh, Sajid Sheikh, Akashi Thapar, Brian Fernandes, Bernadette D’Souza, Irvin D’souza and a boy named Taha, all in their second and third years of college.
The design engineer was 31-year-old Arvind Kanaujiya, who worked with Sterling, an engineering consultancy firm with its office located in a nearby business park.
“They were all trapped on the first floor. According to fire officials, prima facie investigations suggest that a gas leak on the first floor followed by something that sparked led to the fire. The first floor that went up in flames did not have more than 100 square feet area,” said Assistant Municipal Commissioner of L-ward Prashant Sapkale.
Officials said that the fire broke out at 1.30 pm.
The fire caused the connecting staircase to the upper floor to collapse, leaving the eight people trapped upstairs. Also, since the windows there had steel bars, they could not even jump to save their lives.
According to the police, two groups occupied two tables while Kanaujiya was seated alone.
Police said Sarjil, Sajid, Akashi, Brian and Taha sat at one table, while their juniors Bernadette and Irvin had occupied another table.
ACP (Kurla division) Srirang Nadgouda said a case of negligence would be registered against the person who was handling the day-to-day work at the hotel.
“We have found that a person called Tripathi, who managed the hotel on a daily basis, was on the ground floor when the first floor caught fire. He too sustained minor injuries. It was on account of some negligence that such a big incident took place. We will register an FIR against him,” said the officer. He added that if they found out that the owner of the hotel was aware about any norm being flouted, he too would be named as an accused in the FIR.
Another officer said while they had been told that the one-plus-one structure was legal, they had called for the licence and relevant documents from the local L-ward office of the BMC to see if norms had been flouted by the structure.
“Even if the structure is legal, there has definitely been flouting of norms in the cramped first floor structure. We are checking for all permissions and things should soon be clear,” the officer said.
rohit.alok@expressindia.com