8 more arrested in connection with the renovation of burnt towers in Hong Kong; the death toll now reaches 128

Hong Kong — Hong Kong fire service elements found dozens more bodies on Friday during an intensive apartment-by-apartment search in a residential complex in which a fire swept through seven of the eight buildings and authorities arrested eight other people involved in the renovation of the towers. The death toll from one of the deadliest fires ever recorded in the city rose to 128, and many people are still missing. Emergency crews found that some fire alarms in the complex, where many elderly people resided, did not sound when tested, said Andy Yeung, director of the Hong Kong Fire Services, although he did not reveal how many were not working or whether others did. The fire quickly jumped from one building to another as foam panels and bamboo scaffolding covered with nets apparently installed by a construction company caught fire. Authorities on Friday arrested seven men and one woman, aged between 40 and 63, including scaffolding subcontractors, directors of an engineering consulting firm, and project managers overseeing the renovation, the Independent Commission Against Corruption said in a statement. On Friday, rescue crews were prioritizing the apartments from which they had received distress calls during the fire but couldn't reach when the fire was out of control, Derek Armstrong Chan, a deputy chief of the Fire Department, told reporters. It took a day for firefighters to control the fire, and it wasn't declared completely extinguished until Friday morning, about 40 hours after it began. Even two days after the fire broke out, smoke was still coming out of the charred structures of the buildings due to occasional flare-ups.

Prevent more bodies from being found

The Secretary for Security, Chris Tang, informed journalists at the scene that about 200 people are still missing. That includes 89 bodies that have not yet been identified. However, authorities indicated that more remains could be recovered, although teams have finished the search for any living person trapped inside. Andy Yeung, fire director, said that more than 2,300 firefighters and medical personnel participated in the operation, and 12 firefighters were among the 79 people injured. A firefighter also died, he had said earlier. Katy Lo, 70, a resident of Wang Fuk Court, was not at home when the fire started on Wednesday. She rushed back about an hour later to see that the fire had spread to her building. "That's my home... I still can't really believe what happened," Lo said on Friday, as he registered for government assistance for affected households. "All of this still feels like a nightmare."

Among the dead are two Indonesian migrant workers, Indonesia's Foreign Ministry announced Thursday. Another 11 people from Indonesia who worked as domestic workers in the apartment complex were still missing, said Indonesian Consul General Yul Edison.

The Hong Kong government detailed that all official flags of the city will be flown at half-mast as a sign of mourning from Saturday to Monday. The city's leader, John Lee, will observe three minutes of silence on Saturday from government headquarters. The eight-building, 31-story apartment complex in the Tai Po district, a suburb near Hong Kong's border with mainland China, was built in the 1980s and was undergoing a major renovation. It had nearly 2,000 apartments and about 4,800 residents.

Highly flammable foam panels blamed

Three men —the directors and an engineering consultant from a construction company— have been arrested on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter, and the police indicated that the company's leaders were suspected of gross negligence. The police have not identified the company where the suspects worked, but documents published on the homeowners association website showed that Prestige Construction & Engineering Company was in charge of the renovations. The police have seized boxes of documents from the company, where the phones rang unanswered on Thursday. In addition to the new arrests on Friday, the anti-corruption agency also searched the offices of the suspects and confiscated relevant documents and bank records. The authorities suspected that some materials in the exterior walls of the high-rise buildings did not meet fire resistance standards, which allowed the unusually rapid spread of the fire. The police also said they found plastic foam panels — which are highly flammable — adhered to the windows on each floor near the elevator lobby of the only unaffected tower. It is believed that the panels were installed by the construction company, but their purpose was unclear. Preliminary investigations showed that the fire started in a lower-level scaffolding network of one of the buildings, and then spread rapidly when the foam panels caught fire, explained Tang, the security secretary. "The fire ignited the foam panels, causing the glass to break and leading to a rapid intensification of the fire and its spread into the interior spaces," said Tang. The authorities planned immediate inspections of the urbanizations that are undergoing major renovations to ensure that the scaffolding and construction materials meet safety standards. The fire was the deadliest in Hong Kong in decades. One in 1996 in a commercial building in Kowloon killed 41 people. Another in a warehouse in 1948 killed 176 people, according to the South China Morning Post.