New Delhi, June 4 (IANS) As the city comes to terms with devastating fire at the bed and breakfast facility in South Delhi’s Malviya Nagar that claimed 21 lives, the former MLA and Aam Aadmi Party (AA) leader Somnath Bharti on Thursday pointed at flagrant violation of the building by-laws by the hotel and called the mishap an “abject failure” of BJP’s four-engine government.

Speaking to newsmen today, Bharti also questioned the inordinate delay in the arrival of fire tenders at the spot and demanded that accountability be fixed and those responsible be brought to book for such carelessness, leading to a deadly mishap.

He said that many local people complained that the fire brigade, which should have arrived at the scene within minutes, took more than an hour to reach the scene.

“Look, when I came here yesterday, the local people told me that the incident took place at around 8. I reached here at about 8:11 or 8:12 and immediately joined the rescue operation along with others. Many said that the fire brigade took one to one-and-a-half hours to reach here,” he said.

“A distance that could have been covered in two minutes took more than an hour,” he claimed.

He said that the onus for deaths lies with the BJP’s poor track record of governance and stated that the latter can’t escape from the blame and the pain of people who lost their loved ones in the inferno.

At least 21 people were charred to death in the fire that first broke out in the basement and then engulfed the building. Among those who perished are 12 foreign nationals and a family of eight from Gurugram.

Bharti, the three-time MLA from the Malviya Nagar constituency, was unrelenting and unsparing in his criticism of the BJP. Pinning the blame on the BJP government for Delhi deaths, he said that the ruling party is running a four-engine government in the capital and has utterly failed in governance.

“The fire brigade is under your control, the MCD is under you, and the Delhi administration is your responsibility. From the Centre to the Assembly to the LG office to MCD, you are in power everywhere. Your four-engine government cannot escape responsibility for this,” he said, slamming the BJP dispensation.

He also demanded answers on how the rules were ‘relaxed’ for the gutted building, highlighting that the hotel had permission and a licence to run only six rooms, but was in reality operating with 25 rooms, many in the basement, thereby heavily burdening daily operations.

The blaze engulfed the Flourish Stay bed and breakfast facility, housed in a five-story building in Hauz Rani, a densely populated locality, on Wednesday morning. The deadly blaze resulted in the deaths of 21 people.

–IANS

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