Chawri Bazar collapse: six dead; building owner and three contractors arrested

Six people have died after an under-construction building collapsed in Old Delhi’s Chawri Bazar, and police have arrested the building’s owner and three contractors, who were traced to a village in Faridabad.

The three-storey building on Gali Sitara, near the Chawri Bazar Metro station, came down on the morning of Thursday, 5 November; the first call reached the authorities at 9.50 a.m. The toll rose to six on Saturday as rescuers recovered more bodies from the debris. Five of the dead were from Bihar; the sixth lived in Delhi.

Police say the building was being put up illegally and was structurally unsafe. A case has been registered under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita at the Hauz Qazi police station. The owner and the three contractors left Delhi after the collapse and were arrested at Sirohi village in Faridabad, police said.

Rescue work has been slow because the lanes of the Walled City are too narrow for heavy machinery to reach easily. Rescuers were still searching the site on Saturday because another person was feared to be trapped.

The bigger picture

Old Delhi’s lanes are lined with old, tightly packed buildings, many of them extended upwards without approval. Unauthorised construction and weak enforcement have been blamed for a string of building collapses in the capital; in April 2025, 11 people died when a four-storey building fell in Mustafabad in north-east Delhi.