Three rail staffers held for Surat track tampering case; miscreants had wanted to take 'credit' for averting mishap

Surat: Three railway employees were arrested in Gujarat's Surat district on Monday for alleged track tampering and then alerting authorities about a "sabotage attempt" to take credit for averting a possible tragedy, a police official said.

The three, identified as Subhash Poddar (39), Manish Mistry (28) and Shubham Jaiswal (26), are trackmen in the railways' maintenance department, Superintendent of Police Hotesh Joysar said.

Poddar and others, while on inspection between Kosamba and Kim stations, had alerted the railway administration at 5:30am on Saturday about "miscreants" removing elastic clips and two fishplates from one set of tracks and placing them on another to derail a train.

"A probe began after a case for criminal conspiracy was registered under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita at Kim police station against unidentified persons. We found that the trio, while on night patrol, had sent a video of the compromised track to their seniors in order to alert them. Railway officials told us a train passed on the route just before the trio noticed the tampering," the SP said.

"The time interval of the tampering being discovered and the passing of the train was too less and it was not possible to remove the clips and plates in such a short time. We checked the mobile phones of the trio and found videos of tampered tracks shot at different intervals starting from 2:56 am to 4:57 am. Mistry had also deleted photos he had taken," he said.

This established that the photos and videos were taken much before they called the officials at around 5:30 am to report about sabotage, Joysar said, adding the three confessed to the act after intense questioning.

"They indulged in this act to ensure they would be felicitated and be deployed on night duty further, which would give them time to spend with the family during the day. It was Poddar who came up with this idea because their night duty for the monsoon was about to come to an end," the SP said.

He said the trio, for each night duty session, would get an off the following day and they wanted this process to continue, he added.