Overview
- A late-evening blaze ripped through the Indralok/Navghar slum in Bhayandar East, where LPG cylinders exploded as flames jumped between tightly packed huts.
- Officials released differing casualty tallies, with police citing two dead and one person critical while fire authorities reported three dead with bodies sent for postmortem.
- Firefighters brought the blaze under control in about an hour and kept working through the night to cool hotspots and secure the area.
- Crews removed a large cache of LPG cylinders from the site, with counts reported as either 24 or 29, and said the retrieval helped prevent further blasts.
- Investigators are examining the cause of the fire and whether the settlement and cylinder storage were illegal, as local corporators point to prior complaints about encroachment.