Police in central China on Sunday evening announced the detention of no fewer than nine people over a collapsed building, even as increasingly desperate rescuers continue to comb the debris for any survivors.
The said collapsed building, in Changsha city, housed a hotel, apartments, and a cinema. Africa Today News, New York reports that it caved in Friday afternoon, leaving a gaping hole in the dense streetscape.
No fewer than 18 people were trapped and another 39 were incommunicado, according to city mayor Zheng Jianxin.
Five people were rescued from the pancaked structure overnight yesterday.
Changsha police said on social media that the building’s owner and three others responsible for its design and construction were detained Sunday on suspicion of ‘major responsibility for an accident’.
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Another five people, all members of a private building inspection firm, ‘provided a false safety report after conducting a building safety audit of the hotel’, the statement on Twitter-like Weibo said.
No cause for the disaster has yet been given by authorities.
Changsha’s mayor vowed to ‘seize the golden 72 hours for rescue and try our best to search for the trapped people’ in a news briefing Saturday, adding that over 700 first responders had been dispatched to the scene.
Meanwhile, President Xi Jinping on Saturday called for a search ‘at all cost’ and ordered a thorough investigation into the cause of the collapse, state media reported.
A top Communist Party official has been dispatched to the scene — an indication of the severity of the disaster.
China’s minister of emergency management Huang Ming urged officials to “thoroughly eliminate all kinds of hidden safety risks” in a Saturday meeting.
Building collapses are not uncommon in China, due to weak safety and construction standards as well as corruption among officials tasked with enforcement.
Africa Today News, New York recalls that in January, an explosion triggered by a suspected gas leak brought down a building in the city of Chongqing, killing at least 16 people.
Africa Today News, New York