It was supposed to be a quick stop at a Mumbai petrol station around 4:30 pm on May 13 to refuel their car before heading back home to Madhya Pradesh. However, strong winds caused a 250-tonne hoarding to collapse onto the couple’s red SUV at the fuel station in Ghatkopar, Mumbai.
Nearly 50 hours later, late Wednesday, the bodies of retired Air Traffic Control (ATC) general manager Manoj Chansoria, 60, and his wife Anita, 59, were recovered from the car. The exact time and cause of their deaths remain undetermined. The hoarding collapse has claimed 16 lives to date.
On Thursday, Bhavesh Prabhudas Bhinde, 51, the owner of the fallen hoarding, was arrested by the Crime Branch in Udaipur. The Ghatkopar hoarding, located beside a petrol pump in Pant Nagar on the Eastern Express Highway, measured 120×120 feet, exceeding the permitted size of 40×40 feet. Bhinde, the director of Ego Media Pvt Ltd, had been booked in a rape case by Mumbai Police earlier this year.
The couple’s last rites were performed at a crematorium in Sahar on Thursday. They were related to actor Kartik Aaryan. According to colleagues, the couple was in Mumbai to handle paperwork for their visa to visit their son Yash, who lives in the United States. Officials mentioned that their son had been unable to reach them since Monday afternoon. “Their son had been trying to contact them since 5 pm on May 13. Unable to reach Manoj and with Anita not answering her phone, he contacted his father’s colleagues for help,” a former colleague told The Indian Express.
Chansoria had been stationed in Mumbai for nearly a year before his retirement. Some of his colleagues visited the Marol guest house where the couple was staying but found no sign of them.
Following their son’s request, Chansoria’s former colleagues sought assistance from the Mumbai Police to locate the couple. Using mobile network data, the police traced their last known location to Ghatkopar, adjacent to the Eastern Express Highway. Colleagues and
friends rushed to the crash site in Ghatkopar. After hours of searching, their bodies were found inside their car, trapped beneath the girder, on Wednesday afternoon.
“As soon as he realised that his parents were missing on Monday, their son boarded a flight from the United States. Their final rites were conducted at a crematorium in Sahar on Thursday,” a family friend said, adding that Chansoria, who retired on March 31, is related to actor Kartik Aaryan.
Chansoria joined the Airports Authority of India as a senior manager in 1996. Over his career, he served as the airport director in Indore and Amritsar before being transferred to New Delhi as general manager. In April 2023, he moved to Mumbai as general manager of air traffic management.
While 14 bodies were recovered within 24 hours of the crash, a senior Mumbai Fire Brigade official at the site mentioned that the couple’s remains were only recovered from the rubble around midnight on Wednesday. The official told The Indian Express that retrieving their bodies “took much longer” due to one of the five massive girders from the 120-foot hoarding pinning their car down.
“Their car was found in the middle of the crash
site. It was almost flattened due to the weight and pressure of the girder. Each metal girder was extremely large and heavy. Though petrol supply to the station was shut off immediately after the incident on Monday to prevent potential fires, we could not use gas cutters for the first two days due to petrol vapors and fumes in the vicinity. We received clearance to use gas cutters late on Tuesday. Even then, we had to exercise extreme caution, including having multiple fire hose lines for water supply to prevent any fire outbreaks,” a Fire official said.
When the girder was finally cut, rescue agencies used a backhoe excavator to pull the car from beneath. “We had to cut the car doors and then the roof to extract their bodies,” the officer explained, adding that their remains were “almost decomposed” when recovered. Medical officials at Rajawadi Hospital, where the bodies were taken immediately after extraction, confirmed that the bodies were in a decomposed state.
Hours after the Chansorias were found, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) chief Bhushan Gagrani visited the site on Thursday morning. Announcing the end of search and rescue operations at 10:30 am, he told journalists, “We are now working to remove the rubble. That work is expected to take a while since there is substantial debris at the spot.”
Several laborers and officials at the site attributed the slow pace of rescue work to petrol, diesel, and compressed natural gas (CNG) storage tanks buried in the debris. Due to the presence of these fuels, the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and other rescue agencies could not use gas cutters to expedite their work.
“This was an active petrol pump where fuel was stored, so we had to carry out the rescue operation very carefully. Equipment like gas cutters couldn’t be used to remove the structure faster as a precautionary measure. These factors contributed to the delay in completion of rescue operations,” Gagrani said.
