Dharavi fire: Bones found at mishap site

Mumbai: After a major blaze on Wednesday gutted at least 100 small garment factories, bakeries, godowns, residential units and hutments at Kamla Nagar and Shahu Nagar in Dharavi, the city fire department has found pieces of bones at the site

Mumbai: After a major blaze on Wednesday gutted at least 100 small garment factories, bakeries, godowns, residential units and hutments at Kamla Nagar and Shahu Nagar in Dharavi, the city fire department has found pieces of bones at the site.

HT Image

The bones were handed over to the police, who sent it to the Forensic Science Laboratory for examination. The development assumes significance as a 24-year-old man went missing from the same area after the incident. However, the police are awaiting FSL report to ascertain if the bones are of a human or of an animal.

Deputy commissioner of police, zone-5, Manoj Patil confirmed that after the fire incident some pieces of bones were found at the spot on day one after the incident.

The same day, one person, identified as Iqbal Ansari, who used to work at one of the factories, also went missing. His co-workers have filed a missing person’s report with the Shahu Nagar police station.

“Ansari, who hails from Uttar Pradesh, used to work at one of the work units along with six others. His co-workers have told us that after the fire broke out, they had asked him to run. They also claim that Ansari had come out with them, but later he was nowhere to be found. His phone is also missing and is switched off,” Jitendra Kamble, senior inspector, said.

Wednesday’s incident is the second fire reported at Dharavi garment units in the past three weeks. On February 1, a 62-year-old woman was killed in a similar blaze that spread through a small cloth unit operating there.

Spread over 2.5 sq km, Dharavi has a population density of 2.27 lakh people per sq km. It is also home to about 5,000 industrial units plus many more unregistered ones. There are estimated to be around 15,000 single room ‘factories’ in Dharavi.