KOLKATA: Rescuers said Friday there was no hope of finding any more survivors after clearing the crumbled concrete and twisted metal rods from an overpass that collapsed onto a crowded Kolkata neighborhood, killing at least 24 people and injuring more than 80.

Sixty-seven people were pulled from the debris alive, and by Friday afternoon the wreckage was cleared.

“There is no possibility of finding any person alive,” said S.S. Guleria, deputy inspector general of the India’s National Disaster Response Force. Engineers are being consulted about a part of the bridge still hanging over the disaster area, after which workers will “slowly start dismantling this particular section to avoid any collateral damage to houses around it.”

Police detained five officials from a Hyderabad-based construction company contracted in 2007 to build the overpass, and sealed its Kolkata office.

The officials from the IVRCL Infrastructure Co. are being questioned for possible culpable homicide, punishable with life imprisonment, and criminal breach of trust, which carries a prison sentence of up to seven years, police said.

The company signed a contract in 2007 to build the overpass, and was far behind schedule for the project’s completion.

The partially constructed overpass had spanned nearly the width of the street and was designed to ease traffic through the densely crowded Bara Bazaar neighborhood in the capital of the east Indian state of West Bengal. Within hours of concrete being poured into a framework of steel girders on Thursday, about 300 feet of the overpass collapsed.

“I heard an explosion, a solid one,” said resident Rabindra Kumar Gupta, who had been home eating lunch. “My apartment shook. The whole building shook. When I looked outside, there was a lot of smoke.”

Smashed yellow taxis, a crushed truck, destroyed rickshaws and the bloody legs of trapped people jutted from the fallen girders and concrete.

The construction company was far behind schedule for the overpass.