KARACHI: Boat Basin police on Sunday registered a case against the owner of the under construction multistorey building in Clifton and contractor firm owners on charges of manslaughter as the six workers, including two brothers, fell to death on Saturday morning, said area SHO Mohammed Ashfaq. One of the suspects, who provided the construction lift without any safety gears, was arrested, the SHO added.

The six workers died after a fall from the 13th floor of the 23-storey under construction building in Clifton, Block 7, after the construction lift buckled.

The workers were trying to install glass panels on the 13th floor of the building with the help of a lift fitted with a trolley when its rope broke. The lift twisted and all the six workers in the trolley fell to the ground and died.

The area SHO told Dawn that an FIR (157/2019) had been registered on behalf of the state through sub-inspector Mohammed Riaz.

Two of the six dead workers were brothers

The case has been registered against the building owner, Mohammed Amin Patel, and his other partners Moosa Iqbal of the contractor engineering firm (Alaf Engineering) and Irfan Rehman of the contractor firm of glasses/lift provider (Ammonium Glass) under sections 322 (punishment for qatl-bis-sabab: whoever commit qatl bis-sabab shall be liable to diyat) and 34 (common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code.

Irfan Rehman has been detained, said the officer.

According to contents of the FIR, precious human lives were lost owing to “substandard material and lack of precautions and safety measures and refusal of treatment and negligence” of the three suspects.

According to the complainant police officer, they were performing their patrolling duty in the area when they heard cries of workers from the 13th floor of the under construction building as the lift twisted and they fell to the ground. The complainant said that he and other policemen rushed to the spot and saw that three workers had already died while three others were lying there injured.

The police called ambulances and immediately shifted the dead and injured workers to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, where the doctors declared five of them as dead on arrival while the sixth one died later during treatment.

Relatives of two victims, Riaz Khan and Abdul Rehman, took away their bodies without allowing the doctors to fulfil legal formalities.

The SHO said that Riaz and Rehman were brothers. He claimed that the case was registered on behalf of the state as the family of the deceased workers did not approach the police to register an FIR.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2019