A five-story residential block collapsed in Mumbai at daybreak yesterday, killing at least five people and leaving dozens feared trapped inside after the latest building disaster to hit India’s financial capital.
Rescue workers scrambled to find survivors amid the debris of the flattened block in the east of the city, which is owned by the city’s civic administrative body, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai.
“My heart is thumping with fear. I’m just hoping,” said tearful housewife Shanta Makwana, whose daughter and grandchildren were trapped inside the building in which she used to live.
Several diggers were pressed into action to lift some of the larger slabs of concrete to allow teams of rescuers to begin the task of taking out bodies and searching for survivors.
One woman was removed covered in a dark red patterned cloth and carried to a waiting ambulance on a stretcher. Crowds of women waiting nearby could be heard sobbing. A crushed teddy bear and a dismantled gas stove were among the items poking out from the rubble.
“Figures show five deaths and 27 injured up to 2pm,” the corporation’s spokesperson Vijay Khabale-Patil said.
The injured were taken to nearby hospitals.
Local politician Bhai Jagtap said that 22 families lived in the destroyed block.
“The rest of the people are down below, calling people from inside. Rescuers are doing their level best to save lives,” he said after visiting the scene.
The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) also said that 22 families were housed there.
Local commander Alok Avasthy from the NDMA’s response force initially said that up to 70 people were feared trapped.
The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai said that the building was for employees of the local administration and their families who had been asked to move out earlier this year.
“The building was around 30 years old. We had issued a notice to them in April to vacate the building, but they did not act,” Khabale-Patil said.
He did not explain why the families had been asked to leave.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion