Four labourers, two of them brothers, were buried alive under rice sacks which purportedly fell on them while they were sleeping inside a godown in Outer Delhi’s Alipur.
The accident is said to have occurred in the early hours of Friday.
Eyewitnesses said the victims, who used to sleep in the mill had chosen to sleep between two rows of rice sacks to ensure insulation from the cold.
Ruling out foul play, a police officer said they were probing the matter further. They have registered a case of causing death by negligence.
It was a colleague, sleeping some distance away from the victims, who first raised the alarm.
“As he could not find the four labourers when he woke up at 7-30 a.m. He called out to his other colleagues on seeing the fallen rick sacks. Together they removed the sacks to find the four men buried underneath,” said a senior police officer. The four – identified as Pawan Yadav (37), Santosh (24), Lattun Yadav (23) and Manoj (22) – were rushed to the Babu Jagjivan Ram Hospital where they were declared brought dead. All four hailed from the same village in Bihar’s Samastipur district. Santosh and Manoj were siblings.
Ashok Yadav who was sleeping some distance away from the accident spot is learnt to have told the police that even though the accident took place very close to where he was sleeping, he did not hear any screams.
The officer said it was possible that the sacks each of which weighed 50 kilograms, would have muffled the voices.
The police had to remove about 50 such sacks from the heap before the bodies could be brought out.
The godown where the four worked as labourers belonged to one Deepak Jain who also owns a rice mill in the same premise. Mr. Jain deals in wholesale supply of rice.
Many workers employed by Mr. Jain use his godowns to sleep at night. The four victims had spread empty sacks on the floor and slept at around midnight on Thursday.
