A three-day mourning period began in Hong Kong after the deadliest fire in seven decades in the city killed 128 people, with 200 still missing three days after the tragedy.
Authorities in Hong Kong have arrested 11 people in connection with the fire that ripped through the Wang Fuk Court housing complex in northern Tai Po district, engulfing eight tower blocks, each of them around 30 storeys high.
The inferno began on Wednesday afternoon and spread rapidly through seven of the eight 32-storey blocks at the complex, where renovation work was going on. The bamboo scaffolding and green mesh that wrapped the building helped the flames spread further.
The cause of the fire remains unclear, but officials have launched a probe into possible corruption and the use of unsafe materials during renovations at the Wang Fuk Court complex.
Hong Kong leader John Lee, other officials and civil servants, all dressed in black, stood in silence for three minutes early on Saturday outside the central government offices, where flags were lowered to half-mast.
National and Hong Kong flags at all government buildings and facilities will fly at half-mast until Monday, while officials cancelled all non-essential public engagements and postpone or scrap planned celebratory events.
Condolence books have been set up at 18 points around the former British colony for the public to pay their respects.
The death toll is expected to rise as police officers from the disaster victim identification unit enter one of the charred buildings to find possible remains.
Wearing white overalls, helmets and oxygen masks, dozens of officers picked their way over heaps of collapsed bamboo scaffolding and skirted wide pools of water left behind after firefighters spent days drenching the buildings in an effort to cool their smouldering interiors.
Only 39 of the 128 dead had been identified still Friday, officials said.
Many families still face the grim task of looking through the photographs to identify their loved ones while mourners gathered to lay flowers.
Hong Kong’s chief executive John Lee has said the government would set up a HK$300m ($4m) fund to help residents while some of China’s biggest listed companies have pledged donations.
Hundreds of volunteers have stepped in to support survivors, working in shifts through the night to collect, sort and deliver everything from nappies to hot meals.
They have organised themselves into teams to transport supplies and have set up a large makeshift support camp beside a shopping mall opposite the burned complex, offering aid to residents who have lost their homes.
The tragedy also swept up many of Hong Kong’s domestic workers from Indonesia and the Philippines – a community of around 368,000 people, mostly women from low-income countries who live in often cramped quarters with their employers.
Indonesia has confirmed that six of its citizens were among the dead. The Philippines said one worker is critically injured, another is missing, and 28 others are believed to live in the affected area but have not yet been accounted for.
Hong Kong’s anti-graft body said it had arrested eight people on Friday, including an engineering consultant, a scaffolding subcontractor and an intermediary.
Earlier, police arrested two directors and an engineering consultant of Prestige Construction, a firm identified by the government as doing maintenance on Wang Fuk Court for more than a year, on suspicion of manslaughter for using unsafe materials, including flammable foam boards blocking windows.
The fire is Hong Kong’s deadliest since 1948, when 176 people died in a warehouse blaze, and has prompted comparisons to London’s Grenfell Tower inferno, which killed 72 people in 2017.
China said it was launching a fire safety inspection campaign for high-rise buildings across the country. Special attention will be paid to buildings undergoing external wall renovations and interior modifications, the Ministry of Emergency Management said in a statement on Saturday.
The campaign outlines four key inspection areas, including scrutiny of flammable materials used in external wall insulation systems, banned construction materials such as bamboo scaffolding, fire safety equipment, and emergency evacuation routes.
