Bidyut Acharya’s sister consoles their father after his body was identified at SSKM on Monday. (Sanat Kr Sinha)

The toll in Calcutta’s biggest fire tragedy since Independence rose to 43 on Monday with nine more bodies being retrieved from the gutted fifth floor of Stephen Court and officials fearing there could be more under the rubble.

Workers found the charred remains in the worst affected section — Block II on the fourth floor — where a part of the fifth floor had caved in on Thursday, adding to the debris.

“We found five skulls and four body parts but are treating these as nine bodies,” joint police commissioner Jawed Shamim said.

Five of the bodies were later identified as those of Bidyut Acharya, Sangita Kumari Majhi, Aarti Sharma, Prithish Ghosh and Ankush Ghosh. They were all in the list of missing persons.

The recovery of identity cards along with the bodies of Bidyut, Prithish and Sangita Kumari made identification easier, a police official said. Ankush’s family members identified his decomposed body by the colour of his trouser and striped shirt, while Aarti’s yellow salwar-kameez convinced her relatives that they had finally found her.

Police commissioner Gautam Mohan Chakrabarti, who visited Stephen Court on Monday morning, said the final toll would be known only after civic workers cleared the debris from the fourth floor.

The highest toll in a single city tragedy in recent memory was around 71 deaths in the blast that ripped through Bowbazar in 1993. “I can’t remember any single fire incident with so many casualties,” said former police commissioner Tushar Kanti Talukdar.

Although the authorities have blamed an electrical short-circuit in lift number II for the fire, the cause is still shrouded in mystery. The state government formed an 11-member committee on Monday — headed by former chief secretary and human rights commission member S.N. Roy — to probe the blaze and submit a report in three months.

At SSKM, the scene was as chaotic as it has been in the past six days. Manjoor Majhi, Sangita Kumari’s father, discovered her body quite by chance.

“Sangita’s father was here to give a blood sample for DNA sequencing when we learnt that her photo identity-card was found with one of the bodies in the morgue,” Srijan Roy, a friend of the victim.

Detective chief Damayanti Sen was present at the morgue to co-ordinate the identification process, but that did little to calm down family members of the dead or missing fire victims. “We were not even told that we would have to carry passport-size photographs,” said the family member of a victim.

Forensic department officials at SSKM said they had collected samples from 12 bodies and nine members of six families for DNA sequencing.