More: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-28/a ... 60/4655726A string of arrests have been made over the collapse of a factory complex in Bangladesh which has killed at least 363 people, as exhausted rescuers battled to find more survivors among the corpses.
Police arrested three factory owners and two engineers after prime minister Sheikh Hasina vowed those responsible for the country's deadliest industrial disaster would be hunted down. Proprietors Bazlus Samad and Mahmudur Rahman Tapash were detained soon after midnight on Saturday, while Aminul Islam - the owner of two factories based in the doomed building - was arrested Saturday night. They faced preliminary charges of causing death by negligence, police said.
Meanwhile, twenty-nine survivors were pulled from the rubble of the eight-storey Rana Plaza compound on Saturday. The building caved in on Wednesday morning while thousands of garment workers were stitching clothes for Western brands. Emergency workers, gulping breaths of air freshener to mask the stench of rotting bodies, warned their task was getting tougher as survivors were losing their strength to call for help.
"There are many dead bodies but our top priority is finding those who may still be alive," said Mahbubur Rahman, the fire service's director of operations. "There are some survivors. We can hear their feeble cries or hear them talking to each other. Pillars and beams are the biggest problem. Sometimes, even if we can locate survivors, we can't reach them because of these beams. They take a lot of time to cut through."
Thousands of relatives of missing workers massed at the site to watch as bodies were pulled from the debris and laid on a school ground for identification.
Kim