GREATER NOIDA: His decision to step out to buy a fan helped Aslam , a labourer who lived on the ground floor of the under-construction building that collapsed in Shahberi, cheat death. He stayed in the building with four other workers whose bodies were pulled out on Wednesday.Aslam had been looking for his cousin Mohammed Mujahid (18) from Bihar’s Purnia district, whose body was recovered on Wednesday morning but was identified only on Thursday afternoon.Aslam told TOI that he used to stay in the building along with Mujahid and three other painters from Faizabad — Naushad Ahmed, Mohammed Movin and Shamshad.“I went to buy a fan from the market while the other four were inside the building. At 8.15 pm, I called Mujahid to check on him. He told me that he had been washing clothes on the ground floor. I asked him to cook dinner and told him that I would be late,” he said.This proved to be extremely lucky for Aslam. Clutching Mujahid’s photograph since Thursday morning, Aslam kept enquiring about his friend whenever he spotted mediapersons, labour department officials and the police. He was trying to confirm whether Mujahid’s body too had been recovered from under the debris but as officials did not have exact details about the bodies at that time, he was told to visit the district hospital or the mortuary in Sector 94.“The identification is totally dependent on what the kin say. The bodies get identified as and when the families arrive. It is surprising that noone came for Mujahid on Wednesday,” said a police officer. However, only one unclaimed body had been in the mortuary since Wednesday morning.“We got three bodies on Wednesday morning and the rest were recovered later. Two of them were identified while the third body of a man was still unclaimed,” an official at the postmortem house said. That the body was of Mujahid’s could only be confirmed when Aslam reached the mortuary along with two other relatives around 5 pm on Thursday.NDRF men said it was difficult to trace the occupants of the building as they were not found in the spots their kin said they would be. “It seems that the victims might have tried to save themselves as their locations were different from as described by their kin. But the way the two buildings have collapsed, it leaves no hope of survival,” an NDRF official said.

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