New Delhi: Three people, including the factory owner, were sent to judicial custody over the deaths of three men who died while cleaning a septic tank in Mundka, Outer Delhi.The accused — Suraj Marwah (50), the factory owner; Jayant (61), a staff member; and Neeraj (35), the contractor and owner of the vehicle used to transport the workers — were remanded to 14 days’ judicial custody.SDM, Mundka, Shiv Singh Meena, also visited the spot to assess the situation. “There were no safety measures. The workers were sent without gloves and oxygen cylinders inside the septic tank,” he said, adding that within a week, they are planning to give them compensation.He told media that the place where the incident took place was a printing press that had a septic tank into which chemicals were being discharged.Further inquiry revealed that the cleaning contract was worth Rs 20,000 and was meant strictly for machine-based cleaning, with no provision for workers to enter the tank.Police said the tank had three partitions, of which two had already been cleaned using a suction machine mounted on a tractor. “The incident occurred when the workers entered the third partition to clean it manually,” an officer said. The postmortem of the bodies was done Saturday. Police will be sending a sample of the chemicals inside the septic for a forensic test. The three deceased were Chand (42), Arun (38) and Sandeep (32), all residents of Indra Jheel in Sultanpuri.Chand’s sister said that when the first two men entered the tank and stopped responding, Sandeep made a phone call to someone and informed them that he was going inside as well. The person on the other end asked him to wait, saying they were on their way, but Sandeep went in and died.
