New Zealand police yesterday ruled out laying criminal charges over the catastrophic collapse of a office block that claimed 115 lives in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
The CTV building crumpled then burst into flames after the magnitude 6.3 tremor on Feb. 22, 2011, killing those trapped inside, including 65 foreign students mainly from Japan and China.
After a four-year investigation, police said they did not have enough evidence to proceed with negligent manslaughter charges against the engineers responsible for the building.
“The evidence available is not sufficient to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction in court,” police said in a statement.
The building’s collapse accounted for almost two-thirds of the 185 deaths in New Zealand’s worst quake for 80 years, which flattened the downtown area of the South Island’s largest city.
A royal commission concluded in 2012 that the six-story, 1980s-era office block was so badly designed it should never have received a building permit.
It had also been damaged in two quakes which preceded the deadly February tremor, something the local council failed to pick up, allowing it to remain occupied.
The building “pancaked” within 20 seconds of the quake hitting and was engulfed in an inferno so intense that forensic experts had to use DNA testing to identify the remains of many victims.
Police said the investigation raised issues that were “delicate and finely balanced,” but ultimately the evidence was not strong enough to take to court.
New Zealand Minister of Justice Andrew Little said the government would consider introducing a charge of corporate manslaughter to ensure those responsible for such tragedies were held accountable.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
RSS