Bengaluru, Nov 12 (IANS): The Bengaluru police have arrested three owners of chemical units of Rekha Chemicals and Rekha Chemical corporation on Wednesday where a major fire had broken out causing huge loss of properties valued more than Rs 3 crore.

The arrests were made in connection with a major fire that broke out at a chemical unit located in Bapujinagar near Hosaguddadahalli in West Bengaluru and the fire department took more than six hours to douse the fire on Tuesday.

The police arrested owners for conducting their business from a thickly populated residential locality and without obtaining any requisite permissions from Karnataka Pollution Control Board, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike and Fire and Emergency Service departments.

According to the police, the owners, Sajjan Raj, 66, Kamala, 60, and Anil Kumar, 30.

Deputy Commissioner of the Police West division, Sanjeev M. Patil said that Sajjan Raj had been in the Chemical supplies business for nearly three decades in the name of Rekha Chemicals and his wife Kamala is the owner of Rekha Chemicals Corporations. "Whereas their son, Kumar has been running this business for quite some time," he explained.

The DCP added that nearly 64,000 litres of highly inflammable 16 types of chemicals were stored in more than 320 barrels.

The police said that the fire broke out when one of their employees was transferring chemicals from one barrel to the other. "As these chemicals are highly inflammable while transferring chemical produced static charge due to hot sunny day. The fire of this magnitude broke out," the police claimed.

Preliminary investigations by the police further revealed that the fire broke out and went out of control as adjoining godown had stored large quantities of plastic materials.