Bangladesh police arrest blaze building owners

Police in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, say they have arrested two of the owners of a high-rise commercial building where a fire last week killed 26 people and injured some 70 others.

A police official told reporters that the two owners were arrested for negligence and violations of a national building code that resulted in casualties. He said the two could end up facing charges of culpable homicide, as is usual in Bangladesh when negligence causes death.

The disaster has raised fresh questions about fire safety standards and their enforcement in Bangladesh after authorities discovered that the 22-story building had no fire-protected staircases or other adequate safety measures, and had been illegally extended upward.

Read more: The hidden human cost of fast fashion

Deadly series

The fire was the latest in a series of deadly blazes in factories and other structures in Bangladesh in which hundreds of people have died over the past years.

In 2012, a fire at a garment factory shocked the world when 112 workers were killed because they were locked in the building and could not escape the flames. Just months later another garment factory collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people. A 2010 blaze at an illegal chemical storage facility killed at least 123 people.

Last month, at least 67 people died in another fire in the capital.

tj/jlw (AP, Reuters)

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