“They Had Knowledge”: CBI Grills 3 Arrested Railway Officials On Bhubaneswar Outskirts

Bhubaneswar: A five-member Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) team on Saturday began grilling the three arrested Railway officials at Chandaka police station, on the outskirts of Odisha Capital.

The arrested men — Senior Section Engineer (signal) Arun Kumar Mahanta, Section Engineer Mohammed Amir Khan and Technician Pappu Kumar — have been charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and destruction of evidence.

On Friday, a special CBI court in Bhubaneswar had allowed the central agency to take three Railway officials on 5-day remand for interrogation following their arrest in the train tragedy, which claimed over 290 lives last month. They were then taken to Chandaka police station for safety reasons, sources said.

While the questioning of the arrested officials began the previous day, one more railway employee has also been summoned for interrogation in the case.

Sources further said that the investigation revealed that they had the knowledge about the ‘unusual behaviour’ of the switching mechanism in the track changing system and the accident could have been averted if the error was quickly communicated to the station manager of Bahanga station. The charge of destruction of evidence has been slapped because the accused allegedly tried to cover their tracks after the accident. “The charge of culpable homicide, and not murder, has been invoked because of absence of motive or intention,” officials said.

They have been booked under Sections 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence, or giving false information to screen offender) of the Indian Penal Code. These sections are different from the ones which was invoked in the FIR, which pertain to causing death due to negligence and grievous hurt (337/338/204A).

Earlier, the Commission of Railway Safety’s investigation had attributed the triple train crash to human error in the signalling department, dismissing the likelihood of a sabotage or a technical glitch or a machine fault. The wires inside the level-crossing location box had been wrongly labelled and this stayed undetected for years, leading to a mix-up during maintenance work, which resulted in Coromandel Express being shown the wrong signal as it subsequently crashed into Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express and a goods train.

Tragedy could have been averted if past warnings had not been ignored, it added.

Commissioner of railway safety A M Chowdhary of South-Eastern zone said, “Lapses at multiple levels in the S&T department were responsible for this (Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express) accident.” Some of these lapses included wrong labelling of wires.