Kolkata: Kolkata Police informed Friday that the investigating team probing the devastating fire at the factory-cum-warehouse has arrested the manager and deputy manager of ‘Wow Momo’.
The arrests were made late Thursday night, and the two persons have been identified as Momoronjon Sit and Raja Chakraborty. While Sit is the manager of the factory-cum-warehouse, Chakraborty is the deputy manager of the said outlet.
Both are currently at the local Narendrapur Police Station and are being interrogated by the investigating official. They will be presented at a lower court later in the day, and the public prosecutor will seek their police custody for further interrogation, confirmed an official of the South 24 Parganas district police under whose jurisdiction the factory-cum-warehouse comes.
“The police are investigating where they were when the fire broke out on the midnight of January 25. We are also investigating whether there had been any negligence on their part which led to the devastating fire killing so many people,” a district police official said.
With the arrest of Chakraborty and Sit, the total number of arrests in the matter has risen to three. Earlier, the owner of the warehouse of Pushpanjali Decorators, which was adjacent to the Wow Momo factory, Gangadhar Das, was arrested.
Thursday, the state fire services department and forensic team submitted their preliminary report on the incident, where it was stated that the fire did not originate from the Wow Momo factory, but from the adjacent Pushpanjali decorator’s warehouse.
However, Das had vehemently denied the charges and claimed that the fire first spread from the Momo factory.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has accused the state administration of negligence in the matter. Friday afternoon, Suvendu Adhikari, the Leader of Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly, will organise a protest rally in the Anandapur area. Initially, the police denied permission to conduct the protest rally. However, later he got the permission from the Calcutta High Court, which also imposed some conditions.
