Taiwan earthquake death toll rises, building developer in custody

Rescue personnel work at the site where a 17-story apartment building collapsed from an earthquake in Tainan, southern Taiwan, on February 7, 2016. REUTERS / Pichi Chuang

By J.R. Wu

TAINAN, Taiwan (Reuters) – A local court in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan ruled on Tuesday to take into custody the developer of a building which collapsed during an earthquake at the weekend that killed at least 39 people.

Lin Ming-hui, the Wei-guan Golden Dragon Building’s developer, and two other men from his management team are being held without bail on suspicion of negligent homicide while the authorities finish their investigation, the Tainan District Court said in a statement.

The investigation is being led by the Tainan District Prosecutors Office.

The quake struck at about 4 a.m. on Saturday at the beginning of the Lunar New Year holiday, with almost all of the dead found in Tainan’s toppled Wei-guan Golden Dragon Building. Two people died elsewhere in the city.

Rescue work has focused on the wreckage of the 17-story building, where more than 100 people are listed as missing and are suspected to be buried deep under the rubble.

No survivors have been brought out since Monday evening.

Questions have been raised about the building’s construction quality, especially materials used to build it.

Lawyers for the three detained men were not immediately available to comment.

Hsiao Po-jen, director of the legal affairs department of the Tainan city government, told Reuters that Lin had been arrested on Monday evening.

Reuters witnesses at the scene of the collapse have seen large rectangular, commercial cans of cooking-oil packed inside wall cavities exposed by the damage, apparently having been used as building material.

Taiwan media has also reported the presence of polystyrene in supporting beams, mixed in with concrete.

The Wei-guan, completed in 1994, was the only major high-rise building in the city of two million people to have completely collapsed.

Its lower stories, filled with arcades of shops, pancaked on top of each other before the entire U-shaped complex toppled in on itself.

Deputy Tainan Mayor Tseng Shu-cheng told family members that 103 people were still missing in the rubble.

(Reporting by J.R. Wu, and Faith Hung in TAIPEI; Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Lincoln Feast, Nick Macfie and Mike Collett-White)

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