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Asia-Pacific

Three Chinese held for tower collapse in India

By Cheng Guangjin (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-01-13 09:22

Local police in India's Chhattisgarh state on Monday arrested three Chinese executives in connection with a collapsed chimney last September that killed 41 workers, the Indian media reported.

A project manager and two civil engineers of the Shandong Electric Power Construction Corporation (Sepco), which had bagged the contract for the construction of a tower at a thermal power plant for India's Bharat Aluminum Company (Balco), were remanded to judicial custody in Korba, the site of the accident, the Hindustan Times reported on Monday.

Three Chinese held for tower collapse in India

Volunteers and rescue workers retrieve a body from the debris of a fallen chimney at a power plant under construction in Korba, nearly 960 km southeast of New Delhi, India, on Sept 24, 2009. [China Daily]

A district level court rejected their bail application, the paper said.

"The police will produce the charge sheet before the court against the Chinese officials soon," it reported.

Sepco had sub-contracted work on the 275-m chimney to Gannon Dunkerley & Company Limited (GDCL), the paper reported.

The chimney, which was 240-m high at the time of the accident, collapsed on Sep 23 last year. There were at least 300 workers onsite at the time, the report said.

Around 80 Sepco officials had come from China to oversee the chimney work, the Times of India reported.

Dr. Shilpak Ambule, first secretary at the Indian Embassy in China, said the Embassy has "noticed the report", and underlined the part in the report which said an investigation into the accident had indicated that "the materials used were of sub-standard quality."

Earlier, three Balco employees were charged in court with culpable homicide not amounting to murder, according to a report by the AFP.

Another man working for GDCL was also charged, but the report didn't specify on what charges he was being held.

Attempts to reach Sepco officials and China's Embassy in India proved unsuccessful as of press time.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry said it had taken note of the reports.

Huang Feng, a leading international criminal law professor at the Beijing Normal University, reminded Chinese companies and business people to strictly follow local laws while doing business in other countries.