PIL for NIA probe in Elphiston stampede

Mumbai, Oct 4: Five days after the tragedy at Elphinstone railway station in Central Mumbai, the Bombay High Court has posted an urgent hearing of a fresh Public Interest Litigation (PIL) till Thursday that seeks a criminal probe by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) into the stampede. This is the third PIL being filed in the matter related to the Elphinstone stampede and has been filed by a businessman and President of the Republican Pravasi Group, Faisal Banaraswala and Abdul Qureshi who claimed that last Friday stampede should be probed to find out whether the act was a mild terror attack. Thirteen teams from the Central and Western Railways, civic bodies and the police began safety audits of more than 100 railway stations on the city's suburban network, yesterday. According to officials, the teams will inspect every station during the peak hours to understand the safety issues. In the marathon meetings conducted on September 29 and 30, in the aftermath of the Friday’s Elphinstone Road station stampede, which killed 23 people, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal had directed both the zonal railways to form multidisciplinary bodies as early as possible and conduct safety audits of the suburban railway stations within ten days. During the proceedings yesterday at the Bombay High Court, advocate Jayashri Patil and advocate Gunratan Sadavarte mentioned the PIL before a bench headed by Justice Bhushan Gavai and sought an early hearing as they said that the stampede needs a thorough probe from all angles. Based on this, the bench posted the matter for a hearing on October 5. According to Banaraswala, there were rumours of the bridge or sheets falling and short circuit which resulted in the stampede in which 23 commuters were suffocated to death in the melee. There was no bridge collapse. 'Worldwide, such tricks are employed for soft terror attacks. The families of the victims must be given exemplary compensation to reinforce accountability of the Railway administration. On October 2, I had filed a complaint with the Bhoiwada police station to register the deaths as a case of murder under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and as a case of terror,' Banaraswala has said. The PIL has stated 'Railways is sitting over February 2012 recommendations made by the Anil Kakodkar Committee which warned that the situation was grim across City's suburban system and needed to be tackled on a war-footing. The Committee had stated that Mumbai has seen 6,000 deaths on railway tracks in a year, mostly due to trespassing. Trespassing occurs because of lack of barricading, inadequate foot over bridges and lack of other facilities like escalators and elevators for the disabled. 'There are several tweets, including one posted by a cartoonist who had warned of a major accident waiting to happen at Parel station. The Western Railway which was tagged in another tweet to warn about Parel FOB, passed the buck with a reply that the matter is forwarded to the Central Railway. We sought directions to remove physical and policy bottlenecks to clear pathways inside and along railway stations for an organised feeder transport network to stations and bus terminals.' UNI