Around 4,000 electronic voting machines were destroyed in a fire at a government building in Kolkata, PTI quoted West Bengal minister Kaushik Chowdhury as saying on Thursday. The EVMs had been used in 10 constituencies during this year’s Assembly elections in the state, the minister said.

Chowdhury, the minister of state for fire and emergency services, said that it did not appear to be a “normal fire” and that the authorities were examining the possibility of sabotage.

The fire broke out on Wednesday at the nine-storey building in south Kolkata’s Alipore area. The building also housed the South 24 Parganas Zilla Parishad office, among other departments, according to the Hindustan Times.

The zilla parishad is run by the Trinamool Congress, and the South 24 Parganas district is considered to be a bastion of the party’s National General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee.

Chowdhury claimed that the fire started on the third floor, and questioned how it reached the seventh and eighth floors without affecting the fourth, fifth and sixth ones.

“An FIR was registered and an investigation has been initiated,” the minister was quoted as saying by the Hindustan Times. “Forensic officials had come to collect samples. As the building was still hot, they faced difficulty in entering the floors that were gutted.”

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.