May 18: Proclamation notices issued against Stephen Court directors Sanjay Bagaria, Sushil Kumar Sureka and Pradip Kumar More

June 16: City sessions court accepts Bagaria’s petition challenging the notices

A person slapped with the proclamation notice has to surrender before police within a month, failing which court can declare him proclaimed offender, paving the way for attachment of his property

The chargesheet for the Stephen Court blaze has brought into focus not just the stiff legal clause slapped on the six accused but also police failure to trace four of them for close to three months.

The decision not to pin any part of the blame for the blaze that claimed 43 lives on the official owner of the building or the management committees responsible for its maintenance will also come under scrutiny, legal experts said.

The police claimed repeated attempts to nab the three directors of Stephen Court Ltd have drawn a blank and they are banking on a legal recourse to bring Sanjay Bagaria, Sushil Kumar Sureka and Pradip Kumar More to book (see box).

The trio — along with caretaker Tarun Bagadia, his assistant Ramashankar Singh and liftman Jaiprakash Singh — have been charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder. Tarun and Ramashankar were arrested the day after the blaze but Jaiprakash is still at large.

The police have, however, not clarified the role or the culpability of the owner of 18A Park Street. According to the will of Peter Earnest Charles Paul of 1919, the then Official Trustee of Bengal became the owner of the Stephen Court property. Today, the Official Trustee of West Bengal owns the building but claims that it is a “passive owner” with only rent receiving interest.

But can that absolve the owner of the responsibility of seeing if its property is being properly maintained by the lessee, Stephen Court Ltd? Legal experts said it cannot but there were no clear answers from the police.

Also, all four blocks of the building had committees comprising residents to monitor its maintenance. Why did they allow Stephen Court to be reduced to a tinderbox? “Ambiguous ownership and the maze of leases and sub-leases could have contributed to the poor maintenance,” said a cop.

Sleuths claimed to have done an “elaborate job” before filing the chargesheet, which has named 196 witnesses. The probe team comprising five inspectors and sub-inspectors and three assistant commissioners was split under three heads — place of occurrence, body disposal and documentary evidence.

“Documentary evidence traced the ownership tangle that led to the three directors who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the building. Under ‘place of occurrence’ we looked into the complicity of employees of Stephen Court Ltd and how neglect or mismanagement of the building resulted in the loss of so many lives,” said a sleuth.