Mumbai: A manager, director, and a technical superintendent of a shipping company have been arrested on negligence charges in the case of the capsize of accommodation barge P305 on May 17, during Cyclone Tauktae in the Arabian Sea.
The Navy had rescued 186 of the 261 people on board from the barge, while 75 people perished in the tragedy.
Police have arrested Prasad Ganpat Rane, Nitin Dinanath Singh, and Akhilesh Tiwari for culpable homicide, not murder, deputy police commissioner (port zone) Ganesh Shinde said. They were remanded into police custody until July 8 by a local court.
About 23 crew members from the Papaa Shipping Company were on the barge, along with other employees.
Suhas Hemade, a senior inspector, said the three accused were aware of the serious warnings issued by the concerned authority regarding the cyclone. ‘But despite this, they neither called back their employees from the barge nor did they ask them to shift to a safer place,’ he said.
Hemade explained that another director of the company, Shilpa Kanojiya, is also charged in the case, though she has not yet been arrested.
Rakesh Ballav, the master of the barge, was initially charged in the matter on May 21. On the basis of a statement by Mistafizur Rahman Hussain Shaikh, a member of the barge’s maintenance crew, the complaint was filed. Shaikh claimed that Ballav ignored weather alerts and failed to carefully observe the situation as soon as they became aware that it could cause lives to be lost.
According to the police complaint in the case, the barge was anchored near an unmanned platform in Heera oil fields. At about 11.00 pm on May 16, wind speed started increasing. The wind speed almost doubled an hour later. Around 2 am, two of the barge’s eight anchor cables broke, and the captain sent a distress call to a nearby tugboat. The boat was about 16 nautical miles away and the stormy weather prevented it from moving.
The police have recorded the statements of over 100 survivors who were rescued from the barge by the Navy and Coast Guard.
Afcons Infrastructure, which led the consortium chartering the barge along with the crew, has said the master of P305 chose to remain in the sea, close to the platform where the barge was working, despite orders to return to Mumbai harbor.
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