HYDERABAD: Three persons are missing in a major fire that broke out in a six-storeyed building in Secunderabad on Thursday and gutted Deccan Sports Knitwear building in Nallagutta area on the Minister’s Road, police said. Two firemen also sustained injuries during the fire-fighting operation.
The entire building – Deccan Sports Knitwear, located at Nallagutta area on the Minister’s Road, was completely gutted in the accident and the firefighting operations went on till midnight, Ramgopalpet police station inspector G Lingeshwar Rao said on Friday.
He said four workers trapped on the top floor of the building were rescued with the help of a crane, while three others, identified as Md Waseem (38), Md Junaid (32) and Zaheer Khan (22), could not be traced till Friday morning.
“We suspect they might have been trapped in the building when flames engulfed it. There are still flames in the building, which is on the verge of collapse and there is no way the police or fire personnel could enter it. We have deployed drones to search for the missing persons. Unless the debris is removed, we cannot confirm their death,” Rao said.
Additional director general of the fire department Y Nagi Reddy said 29 fire engines were deployed over 12 hours to control the fire. Two firemen, Dhananjay Reddy and Narsing Rao, fell sick due to the thick smoke.
“The condition of Narsing Rao is critical and he is undergoing treatment in the Intensive Care Unit of the Gandhi Hospital,” Nagi Reddy said, adding the cause of the fire accident was still not known.
Secunderabad electricity department official Sridhar ruled out the possibility of any short circuit in the building. “There was no tripping of power supply in the building, as there was no such alert in the adjacent sub-station. The wiring and metres were intact,” he said.
Additional Commissioner of Police (law and order) Vikram Singh Mann told reporters that it was a commercial complex, and a lot of fabric stored inside caught fire. “As the intensity of the fire is too high, we have evacuated the people from all the surrounding buildings,” he told reporters, adding that the owners of Deccan Sports Knitwear Mohd Owaisi and M A Raheem went absconding soon after the incident.
State home minister Md Mahmood Ali and animal husbandry minister T Srinivas Yadav, who visited the incident spot, supervised the rescue and relief work.
Yadav, who represents the Sanathnagar assembly constituency, said the authorities were asked to demolish the entire building in order to prevent damage to the adjacent buildings. “Stringent action would be taken against illegal warehouses in the midst of residential areas as they were posing a risk to people’s lives,” he said.
Union tourism minister G Kishan Reddy, who represents the Secunderabad parliamentary constituency, also visited the area on Friday and enquired with the locals about the incident. He asked the police and fire department authorities to speed up the rescue operations.
