Two more bodies were e from the wreckage at the crash site of a massive billboard in Mumbai, bringing the death toll to 16 as rescue efforts were called off Thursday morning with no hope of finding survivors three days after the tragedy.
Former Mumbai ATC General Manager Manoj Chansoria, 60, and his wife Anita, 59, had been missing since Monday evening when they departed for Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh from the ATC guest house in western Mumbai.
The bodies of a man and a woman were extricated from a car trapped beneath the collapsed billboard shortly after midnight on Wednesday, and were later identified as Manoj Chansoria and his wife, officials said.
The 120-footx120-foot billboard, which officials said was illegally installed, collapsed onto a petrol pump in the Chheda Nagar area of suburban Ghatkopar during a dust storm on Monday evening, claiming 14 lives and injuring 75 others.
A Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) official said that the bodies of Chansoria and his wife were in a “decomposed state” and were transported to the nearby civic-run Rajawadi Hospital around 1 AM.
Chansoria’s mobile phone location was tracked to the petrol pump on which the billboard had collapsed a day earlier, indicating that he may have stopped at the petrol pump for refueling when the billboard crashed.
The search and rescue operation at the crash site, spanning 66 hours, ended at around 10:30 AM on Thursday, according to an official of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF).
BMC Commissioner Bhushan Gagrani announced the conclusion of the operation after inspecting the site, revealing that 16 people had died in the tragic incident, that could have been averted.
Gagrani told reporters that thorough checks had been conducted at the site to ensure no additional people were trapped, adding that the task of clearing the debris would continue throughout the day.
Various agencies including the BMC, Mumbai police, BPCL, NDRF, Mumbai fire brigade, and Mahanagar Gas were part of the rescue operation, Gagrani said.
Efforts are underway on “war footing” to remove illegal billboards in the city, he said.
Officials had earlier said that the giant billboard that collapsed in Ghatkopar was situated on land controlled by the Government Railway Police (GRP).