‘Please, kisi tarah se bachalo, main lift mein fasa hoon’: A day after Karol Bagh fire, civil services aspirant, lab technician found dead; Vishal Mega Mart lacked fire clearance | Delhi News
NEW DELHI: Two people, a 25-year-old civil services aspirant and a 30-year-old lab technician, were killed in the massive fire at Vishal Mega Mart in central Delhi’s Karol Bagh on Friday. According to the fire service, the building lacked a valid fire certificate and a case of negligence has been registered by police.The deceased were identified as Kumar Dhirender Pratap Singh and Pawan Gautam. Singh, originally from Sonbhadra in Uttar Pradesh, was found dead inside the elevator, where he is believed to have suffocated after getting trapped, while Gautam, an ITI graduate from Aligarh who worked as a lab technician, was found on the second floor.According to Delhi Fire Service, the blaze was reported at 6.44pm on Friday. Minutes later, Singh’s brother, Vikram, received a desperate message from his trapped sibling. “At 6.51pm, my brother texted me about being stuck in the lift,” Vikram revealed to TOI. “He pleaded, ‘Kisi tarah se bachalo, main lift mein fasa hua hoon. Bohot suffocation ke kaaran saans lena mushkil ho raha hai’ (Please save me however you can, I’m trapped in the lift. I feel suffocated and cannot breathe)’.”Vikram, who was in Sonbhadra, immediately contacted his brother’s friend to rush to Karol Bagh. “She went and requested authorities to check the lift around 7pm. They told her they had done it and hadn’t detected anyone inside,” he claimed. His body was eventually recovered at 2.30am on Saturday. “He was unconscious when we saw him. He was shirtless and in his vest, maybe because he used his shirt to cover his face to avoid the smoke,” said Vikram. “I wish I had been there to go into the building and save him,” he added.Before the tragedy, Singh had been studying in a library nearby for 4-5 hours, according to his friends. Vikram remembered his younger brother, “He had a good nature. Our mother is a govt schoolteacher in UP and he often volunteered to teach the students whenever he visited our village.”The fire broke out in the multistorey building that housed Vishal Mega Mart, gutting its basement, ground, first, second and third floors. The structure had only two staircases and one lift, with no ventilation except the entrance. Preliminary investigations suggest the fire was caused by a short circuit on the second floor.Firefighting operations were severely hampered due to the lack of ventilation in the building. Fire officers had to use JCB machines to break open the front-facing parts of the upper floors to extinguish the flames, with 15 fire tenders and 90 firefighters engaged in the fierce struggle to control the massive blaze.TOI reached out to Vishal Mega Mart for a response, but the company had not replied at the time of filing this story.
