The man responsible for the sea link pileup accuses the authorities for the accident.

MUMBAI: Irfan Abdul Rahim Bilkya, arrested for causing Wednesday’s sea link pile-up, in which five people were killed and 13 were injured, was on Thursday remanded in police custody for a day. His lawyer implied that he was distracted as he was trying to plug in a cellphone charger.Bilkiya was booked under the Indian Penal Code’s sections 304-a (causing death by negligence) and 304-2 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), and for rash driving under the Motor Vehicles Act. Dressed in a black T-shirt and black trousers, with his right arm in a plaster cast, he was escorted into a tiny courtroom on the first floor of Bhoiwada court, Dadar, on Thursday. Bilkiya’s father, Abdul Rahim, and a few of his friends attended the proceedings.Bilkiya is accused of ramming into a stationery Swift (which had crashed after a tyre burst) and causing a pile-up involving two more cars — a Baleno and a Mercedes, which had stopped to help the Swift’s occupants.Bilkiya’s lawyer, Vikram Chavan, argued that police had wrongly invoked the charge of culpable homicide as there was no intention or foreknowledge of the accident on his part. Chavan argued that the authorities should have cordoned off the site , once the Swift hit the sea link’s railing after its tyre burst (the first accident, before Bilkya’s Creta rammed into the Swift and other vehicles, resulting in a pile-up). The accused complained that he is highly diabetic and also a victim of the accident since he fractured his hand.