Police failed to act in time: relatives

The relatives of the minor victim, Mahi, on Thursday alleged the district police failed to provide timely assistance. HT reports.

The relatives of the minor victim, Mahi, on Thursday alleged the district police failed to provide timely assistance.

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According to them, the police did not have the expertise or wherewithal to undertake the rescue work. The girl’s father, Neeraj Upadhyay, a supervisor at a factory in Manesar, is unhappy with local authorities as Mahi has not been rescued even after 24 hours.

He said, “Police lacked proper equipment and instead of taking action, they started shouting at me. There was no activity at all for two hours. The oxygen pipe was hardly 10 feet long and how can oxygen reach 68 feet below via such a small pipe. It is only on Thursday morning that the authorities have woken up to the situation.”

Not only did it take the police two hours to search for an emergency light, it was finally a Good Samaritan’s intervention with night vision CCTV cameras that helped capture the images of the baby inside the dark pit on the morning of the next day.

Deepender Kaushik, who owns Black Hawk, a surveillance company in Gurgaon, contacted sub divisional magistrate Sitender Duhan and informed him about the night vision camera immediately upon hearing of Mahi’s predicament.

Even the Haryana fire services department looked helpless as they turned up on the spot around 12.45am on Thursday, equipped only with ladders, ropes, torches and fire tender.

The rescue operation was largely taken over by the Army as the 3rd Engineer Regiment from Delhi Cantonment arrived at 6am on Thursday.