Bangladesh factory fire kills 8; collapse toll tops 900

DHAKA (Reuters) - Eight people were killed when a fire swept through a garment factory in an industrial district of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, police and an industry association official said on Thursday.

The fire, which broke out overnight in the Mirpur area, occurred two weeks after more than 780 people were killed in a factory collapse outside the city, the South Asian country's worst industrial accident.

"It is not clear to us how the accident happened, but we are trying to find out the cause," Mohammad Atiqul Islam, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, told Reuters.

The fire broke out at a factory belonging to the Tung Hai Group, a large garment exporter, after most workers had gone home, police said.

On Wednesday the Bangladesh government said it had shut down 18 garment factories for safety reasons following the April 24 collapse of Rana Plaza, which housed five garment factories making clothes for Western brands. (Reporting By Serajul Quadir; Editing by Matthew Green and Alex Richardson)

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Bangladeshi engineer arrested in building collapse

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Bangladeshi police arrested the engineer who warned that a building housing garment factories was unsafe a day before it collapsed, killing at least 487 people.

Abdur Razzak Khan worked as the Rana Plaza owner's consultant when the owner illegally added three floors atop his five-story building, police official Ohiduzzaman said Friday. Khan was arrested Thursday on a charge of negligence.

Owner Mohammed Sohel Rana called Khan to inspect the building after it developed cracks on April 23, local media have reported. Khan appeared on a private television station saying after his inspection that he told Rana to evacuate the building because it was not safe.

Khan, a former engineer at Jahangirnagar University near Savar, said he drew attention of the government engineers for the building to be examined further.

Police ordered the building evacuated, but witnesses say Rana told people gathered outside the next morning that the building was safe and that garment factory managers told their workers to go inside. It collapsed hours later.

Police official Ohiduzzaman said Khan was arrested on charge of negligence.

The elected mayor of Savar municipality, Mohammad Refatullah, also has been suspended for alleged negligence in approving the design and layout of the doomed building, said Abu Alam, a top official of the local government ministry.

Alam said an official investigation has found that the mayor ignored rules in approving the design and layout. The mayor is from main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and the opposition BNP has criticized the suspension as politically motivated.

Authorities raised the confirmed death toll to 487 late Friday morning in the deadliest disaster to Bangladesh's $20 billion-a-year garment industry that supplies global retailers.

Workers were carefully using cranes to remove the concrete rubble.

"We are still proceeding cautiously so that we get the bodies intact," said Maj. Gen. Chowdhury Hassan Suhwardy, the commander of the area's army garrison supervising the rescue operation.

The official number of missing was still at 149 though unofficial estimates are higher.

Rana was arrested earlier and is expected to be charged with negligence, illegal construction and forcing workers to join work, which are punishable by a maximum of seven years in jail. Authorities have not said if more serious crimes will be added.

The Bangladesh High Court has ordered the government to confiscate Rana's property and freeze the assets of the owners of the factories in Rana Plaza so the money can be used to pay the salaries of their workers.

Among the garment makers in the building were Phantom Apparels, Phantom Tac, Ether Tex, New Wave Style and New Wave Bottoms.

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3 killed in French building collapse after blast

REIMS, France (AP) — A possible gas explosion ripped off the side of a five-story residential building in France's Champagne country on Sunday, killing at least three people and injuring 14 others, officials said.

More than 100 rescue workers, firefighters, sniffer-dog squads and bomb and gas experts were deployed to the gutted building in a subsidized housing complex in the city of Reims, east of Paris, officials said. Heaps of debris spilled out of the building onto a grassy esplanade below.

"The explosion of a residential building in Reims is a terrible drama," the office of French President Francois Hollande said in a statement, conveying his condolences to the victims' relatives.

Michel Bernard, the top government official in Reims, said crews searching for survivors turned up the body of a woman under the rubble Sunday afternoon, raising the death toll to three. He said it was unlikely that the toll would rise any higher.

Through most of the day, authorities had said at least two people had died. One person was hospitalized with serious, but not life-threatening injuries, and another 13 people had minor injuries, officials said. Authorities used backhoes to help clear away the rubble.

"We don't know the cause of the explosion. It was probably due to gas," Reims mayor Adeline Hazan said at the scene. An official investigation was under way to determine the cause, she said. Authorities say the three people known to have died were adults.

Witnesses described a powerful blast.

"The explosion was very strong, like a sonic boom from a fighter plane. We had been playing football on a field about 30 meters (100 feet) away, and ran to the scene," housing project resident Abdel Kader said. "The building had fallen like a house of cards ... 30 seconds after that we saw a man calling for help, he was on a slab. His legs were caught."

"Later, he died," Abdel Kader, a 27-year-old job seeker who declined to provide his family name, said.

Bernard, the government official in Reims, said the building dated to the 1960s. About 10 of the 40 or so apartments were affected on the end of the rectangular building, he said.

The precariousness of some buildings has come to light internationally in recent days following the collapse Wednesday of an eight-story building in a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where at least 362 people have been confirmed to have died. Officials said three floors of the building, which had housed garment factories, had been built illegally.

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Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten contributed to this story from Paris.

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2 killed in French building collapse after blast

REIMS, France (AP) — A possible gas explosion ripped off the side of a five-story residential building in France's Champagne country on Sunday, killing at least two people and injuring 14 others, officials said. Search teams extracted a victim's body as they pored over the rubble in a hunt for possible survivors.

More than 100 rescue workers, firefighters, sniffer-dog squads and bomb and gas experts rushed to the gutted building in a subsidized housing complex in the city of Reims, east of Paris, officials said. Heaps of debris spilled out of the building onto a grassy esplanade below.

"The explosion of a residential building in Reims is a terrible drama," the office of French President Francois Hollande said in a statement, conveying his condolences to the victims' relatives.

The Interior Ministry also issued a statement saying two people died and 14 people were injured.

"We don't know the cause of the explosion. It was probably due to gas," Reims mayor Adeline Hazan said at the scene. "We know two people are dead — we don't know their identities yet," she said, adding that the survivors were taken to hospital.

"These are not definite numbers, because we are looking for another two to five people," Hazan said. An official investigation was under way to determine the cause, she said. Authorities insisted that the two people known to have died were adults.

Witnesses described a powerful blast.

"The explosion was very strong, like a sonic boom from a fighter plane. We had been playing football on a field about 30 meters (100 feet) away, and ran to the scene," housing project resident Abdel Kader said. "The building had fallen like a house of cards ... 30 seconds after that we saw a man calling for help, he was on a slab. His legs were caught."

"Later, he died," Abdel Kader, a 27-year-old job seeker who declined to provide his family name, said.

Michel Bernard, the top government official in Reims, said the building dated to the 1960s. About 10 of the 40 or so apartments were affected on the end of the rectangular building, he said.

Late in the day, authorities deployed backhoes to help clear away the rubble.

The precariousness of some buildings has come to light internationally in recent days following the collapse Wednesday of an eight-story building in a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where at least 362 people have been confirmed to have died. Officials said three floors of the building, which had housed garment factories, had been built illegally.

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Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten contributed to this story from Paris.

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