CHENNAI: A 23-year-old IT employee from Madipakkam collapsed at a bar inside a mall near Anna Nagar and later died in a hospital in the wee hours of Sunday. He was attending a late-night DJ party organised by a Chennai-based event management company at the mall and had come down to the bar during the event, according to police. The deceased was identified as S Praveen.
Police came to know about the incident after a team from the Anna Nagar Prohibition Enforcement Wing (PEW) visited the mall following a tip-off that unlicensed liquor was being served at the party, which, police later said, didn’t have permission from the city police.
The party was organised on the fourth floor of the mall and around 500 people from across India attended it. Tickets, costing `1,500 a person, had been sold via a mobile app. According to the Thirumangalam police, the Anna Nagar PEW received the tip-off in the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday. A PEW team, along with personnel from the Thirumangalam police station, visited the mall and found that unlicensed liquor was being served to attendees, including those below the age of 21, at the party. The police then stopped the event, sources said.
A while later, the police visited the bar on the second floor to question its management. They soon learnt that one of the party attendees had collapsed at the bar and had been taken to a nearby hospital.
They found that the person, Praveen, was later shifted to the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, where he died without responding to treatment. The police have sent the body for a post-mortem examination.
A senior city police officer told TNIE that the police have registered a case under CrPC Section 174 (suspicious death) and that they are awaiting the post-mortem examination report to ascertain the cause of death. After the police found that the bar, too, was serving unlicensed liquor to people, including those below 21 years of age, they seized 844 bottles of liquor from the bar and arrested three staff — Nivas Bojaraj, Bharathi, and Edwin Devaputhiran. The bar was sealed later in the day.
Action against unauthorised parties
Following the incident, the city police commissioner, in a press release, said severe action would be taken against those who organise unlicensed liquor parties and large-scale entertainment events without permission from the city police