Scores of people are believed dead after a shopping mall in southern China collapsed into a heap of rubble while construction workers were illegally adding extra storeys.
A local newspaper said more than 240 people were believed to have been in the mall, which had more than 20 shops and restaurants on the ground floor, when it collapsed on Friday afternoon. It was not known how many got out alive.
The jagged field of bricks and concrete where the mall had stood in the Houjie suburb of Dongguan suggested there was little chance of anyone inside it surviving when it collapsed like a pack of cards, witnesses said.
"There was a loud rumbling sound and I thought it was an earthquake. But within seconds, the whole building just crumbled before my eyes," one witness told Hong Kong cable television.
State television put the official toll at eight dead and 32 injured, but one factory worker said he had been told by colleagues helping in the rescue attempt that more than 20 bodies had been pulled out on Friday night.
Officials in Dongguan, a city in Guangdong Province, said rescue work was abandoned yesterday morning because there was no hope of finding anyone alive in the flattened mass.
"Most of the dead bodies have been found and removed," said a city official who refused to say how many bodies had been extracted by the time rescue work was halted at what had been a one-storey mall to which builders were adding two more floors.
It was the latest accident in a construction industry plagued by shoddy work.
Premier Zhu Rongji (
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