The owner of Rituraj Hotel, Akash Chawla, and its Manager Gaurav Kapoor were arrested by the Kolkata Police early on Thursday morning.

According to police sources, both the accused will be produced in the Bankshall court and the police will pray for their custody as they would like to question them.

On April 29, a massive fire broke out at the first floor of the Rituraj Hotel in the Barabazar area, which claimed 14 lives.

According to police sources, a suo moto case had been filed by the Jorasanko Police station and another case had been filed by the Fire department.

The case has been filed under section 105 (mandates that search and seizure proceedings, including the preparation of the seized property list and its signing by witnesses, be recorded through audio-video electronic means, preferably a mobile phone), 110 (attempt to commit culpable homicide), 124 (voluntarily causing grievous hurt by use of acid, etc), 125 (endangering life or personal safety), and 287 (negligent conduct related to fire or combustible matters) of the BNS along with sections of the WBFS Act.

Out of the 14 deceased, 12 have been identified so far.

According to the police, the postmortem of the bodies showed that the deaths were due to effects of asphyxia due to inhalation of carbon soot. Thermal burn injuries on the bodies have also been detected, which were found to be antemortem.

Residents had alleged that there were a lot of illegal construction in the building and the fire allegedly started from the combustible materials that were kept for the building of a dance bar on the first floor.

The Fire department and residents had claimed that there were no fire escape exits and there was no opening from which the smoke could go out, which led to the building to turn into a gas chamber.