Three days after a century-old bridge collapsed in Gujarat's Morbi, killing 135 people, the owners of the company blamed for poor renovation work remain missing.
Two managers of the Oreva Group and two sub-contractors who had repaired the bridge have been sent to police custody till Saturday. Five other arrested men, including security guards and ticket booking clerks, are in judicial custody.
A district lawyer's body has refused to represent any of the accused, in a reflection of rising public anger.
The contractors who carried out the bridge repairs were not qualified for such work, the prosecution told a court on Tuesday. "Despite that, these contractors were given repair work of the bridge in 2007 and then in 2022," the prosecutor said.
The floor of the bridge was replaced but its 150-year-old old cables were not. The cables could not take the weight of the new flooring and snapped, said the prosecution, citing a forensic report. The weight of the bridge had increased due to four-layered aluminum sheets used in the flooring and the cables couldn't support it.
Oreva allegedly outsourced the work o a little-known contractor.
Oreva's Managing Director Jaysukhbhai Patel, who had publicly claimed that the renovated bridge will hold up for at least eight to ten years, has not been seen since the tragedy, locals have told NDTV. The Oreva company's farmhouse in Ahmedabad is locked and abandoned, with not even a security guard in sight.
Mr Patel was last seen, along with his family, at the reopening of the bridge on October 26.
He had signed the contract with the Morbi municipal corporation. The Oreva company, a watchmaker, bagged a 15-year deal to maintain the bridge in March and reopened it seven months later - before schedule. The Morbi municipal body allegedly awarded the contract to Oreva without a bidding process.
The survivors of the tragedy and the opposition have questioned why the police FIR doesn't name either the top bosses of Oreva or the civic officials who signed the contract despite glaring gaps.
The agreement did not even mention any requirement of a fitness certificate before the bridge was opened to the public.
Opposition parties and locals have accused the state government of sparing the main accused and making scapegoats out of security guards, ticket sellers and lower level employees of Oreva.
The police have said the agency failed to carry out a quality check before opening the bridge to the public on October 26 - the day the Gujarati New Year was celebrated - displaying severe carelessness.
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