NEW DELHI: Absconding PG operator, advocate Shubham Tyagi, surrendered before a Delhi court on Friday in connection with the Satya Niketan building collapse case, which killed seven people, including five students.
The court, which had denied Tyagi anticipatory bail on Thursday, sent him to two-day police custody on a plea moved by the prosecution, which said that his custodial interrogation was required to unearth the larger conspiracy.
According to police, Tyagi was operating a paying guest accommodation in the building in south Delhi and had taken a floor of the property on lease from its owner Hariram Gupta.
Additional Sessions Judge Saurabh Partap Singh Laler denied the pre-arrest bail, noting that Tyagi had suppressed a rent agreement showing him as a lessee of the building.
“A person renting out floors of a building as a paying-guest house for students assumes a responsibility to be alive to the condition of that building… If construction is going on and occupants object, the least that is expected is a complaint to the owner and, if the owner is unresponsive, to the concerned authorities -- not a threat to make the occupants vacate,” the judge said.
While seeking Tyagi’s two-day custody, police told the court that his questioning was required for further investigation into the circumstances leading to the collapse of the five-storey building.
Tyagi had been absconding since the incident, and police teams had been conducting searches at several places to trace him, it said.
The judge also extended PG, Hostel Daze, operator Sudhanshu Lovneesh’s police custody by two more days in the case.
The police on Thursday said they were examining mobile-phone records and online chat history of Lovneesh to ascertain what transpired immediately after the building collapsed.
Police said Lovneesh's phone has been sent for forensic examination.
Police arrested the building owner's son Mahesh, labour contractor Sanoj Kumar, and the PG operator. Police also arrested building owner Hariram Gupta, 81, and his wife Urmila, 75, who are currently in judicial custody.
The building at Satya Niketan Market, which was being run as a hostel under the name "Hostel Daze," collapsed on September 6, killing five students and two labourers.
Tyagi, enrolled with the Bar Council of Delhi (BCD), claimed he merely invested money in the PG business run by his friend Sudhanshu Lovenish Kumar and had no ownership, control or knowledge of the building's structural condition. He placed the rent agreement before the Court showing Sudhanshu Lovenish Kumar as lessee.
However, the prosecution produced a second rent agreement showing Tyagi himself as lessee of the second and third floors of the same building on near-identical terms.