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Police SIT blames its 'cousin' for mishandling Peer Dastgeer Shrine blaze | | | ET Report srinagar, July 7: In a major development the SIT formed by Jammu and Kashmir police has blamed its 'cousin' the State Fire Services Department for negligence in fighting the fire at Peer Dastgeer Sahib shrine in Khanyar. In its report the SIT has claimed that the Fire Services Department was alerted at 6.30 am on the fateful day when fire broke out inside the shrine, but the Fire Services Department took up to 8.30 am to send its fire fighting team to the shrine. The report also claims that even the Bronto sky vehicles available with the Fire Services Department were not pressed into service. The SIT has questioned 22 persons after it started the investigations and those questioned include the vice chairman of the Waqf. The SIT has also said in its report that the local shrine Waqf did not cooperate with the SIT while it was trying to establish whether faulty wiring had caused electric short circuit. The SIT has asked people who might have taken camera snaps of the fire to cooperate with it so that the SIT can reach to logical conclusions in its investigations. Early Times had reported the day after the fire incident that the fire hydrants which were installed at all vital junctions in Srinagar city and also adjacent to the shrine at Khanyar had mysteriously not been used to fill the fire service tankers to douse the flames at the shrine. This newspaper had also expressed serious concern over the absence of hydrants in the city and demanded a fire audit of the entire city to identity the reasons those have led to the disappearance of the fire hydrants in the city. It is also learnt that the Divisional Commissioner Kashmir, Asgar Hassan Samoon who is independently conducting a probe into the fire incident has also indicted the local Fire Services Department for serious negligence while handling the fire occurrence at such a highly revered religious site in the State. Instead of setting his own house in order it is now known that the Director of the local Fire Services Department wrote a letter to the State police alleging that a police constable named Imtiyaz Ahmad Khan had been instigating the people to violence during the fire incident. The police constable has now been booked under Section 109 by the Khanyar police station. It is customary for the various heads of departments in the times of crisis to blame each other to escape responsibility. While the State police is responsible to carry its investigations into the tragic incident to logical conclusion so that the citizens of the State are told why a highly revered and loved religious shrine got destroyed in a mysterious fire incident, it is also the duty of the State Government to fix responsibility for dereliction of duty wherever it occurred during the handling of the unfortunate fire incident. |
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