The toll in the building collapse in Karnataka’s Dharwad rose to five on Wednesday after rescuers retrieved two more bodies from the debris and one person died of his injuries at a hospital, PTI reported, quoting Hubballi-Dharwad Commissioner of Police MN Nagaraj. Fifty-five people have been rescued from the rubble of the four-storeyed building that collapsed on Tuesday evening in Kumareshwara Nagar.
The police said the rescue operation has been intensified to pull out 30 people who are believed to be trapped at the site.
Nagaraj said no arrests have yet been made in the case. “We have registered a case,” he said. “Arrests will also follow but our focus at present is on the rescue operations.”
The rescue operation is being conducted by three National Disaster Relief Force teams, police personnel, five fire tenders and 10 ambulances. Two of the NDRF teams are from Ghaziabad and one from Bengaluru.
Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy said he was monitoring the rescue operation and urged relatives not to panic. “The rescue work is on a war footing,” Kumaraswamy tweeted. “All those feared trapped in the building will be rescued as soon as possible.”
On Tuesday, former Karnataka minister and Congress leader Vinay Kulkarni said that his relative was one of the building’s owners and that all those found guilty should be penalised.
A report in The News Minute said that Kulkarni’s father-in-law Gangadhar Shintry was one of the owners and that the owners had obtained a partial completion certificate from the Hubballi-Dharwad Municipal Corporation.
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