Authorities probe corruption and negligence in Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades

HONG KONG — Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades has raised questions about corruption and negligence in the renovations of the apartment complex where at least 128 people died.

An intense fire broke out at Wang Fuk Court complex in Hong Kong’s northern suburbs Wednesday afternoon, with flames covering seven of eight of the towers. The complex was home to some 4,800 residents, some of whom had raised safety concerns about the renovations more than year before the fire.

Police on Wednesday arrested three men from a construction company on suspicion of manslaughter and gross negligence. They are now out on bail. Authorities then arrested seven men and one woman, ranging in age from 40 to 63, including scaffolding subcontractors, directors of an engineering consultant company and project managers supervising the renovation, in a corruption probe.

Police have not identified the company where the suspects worked, but documents posted to the homeowners association’s website showed that the Prestige Construction & Engineering Company was in charge of renovations. Police have seized boxes of documents from the company, where phones rang unanswered Thursday.

Officials also said they were investigating the materials used, both the netting on the scaffolding and the foam panels, and their role in the blaze.

Residents found safety issues a year before fire

For almost a year, some residents at the Wang Fuk Court complex had been raising safety concerns to Hong Kong authorities about the construction netting being used in the renovation project, according to documents reviewed by the AP, specifically about the netting that covered the scaffolding.

Hong Kong’s labor department in a statement on Saturday confirmed they had received such complaints, adding that officials had carried out 16 inspections of Wang Fuk Court’s renovation project since July 2024, and had warned contractors multiple times via writing that they must ensure they met fire safety requirements.

The labor department said they had reviewed the product quality certificate of the netting and that it was in line with standards.

Those very materials are now of great interest after preliminary investigations showed the fire started on a lower-level scaffolding net of one of the buildings. It then spread rapidly as the foam panels caught fire, said Chris Tang, the city’s secretary for security. Police also said they had been looking at highly flammable foam panels.

“The blaze ignited the foam panels, causing the glass to shatter and leading to a swift intensification of the fire and its spread into the interior spaces,” Tang said.

Further, first responders found that some fire alarms in the complex, which housed many older people, did not sound when tested, said Andy Yeung, the director of Hong Kong Fire Services, though he did not say how many were not working or if others were.

Intense blaze took days to put out

It took firefighters a day to bring the fire under control, and it was not fully extinguished until Friday morning — some 40 hours after it started.

Crews prioritized apartments from which they had received emergency calls during the blaze but were unable to reach in the hours that the fire burned out of control, Derek Armstrong Chan, a deputy director of Hong Kong Fire Services, told reporters.

Twelve firefighters were among the 79 people injured in the blaze, and one firefighter was killed.

Even two days after the fire began, smoke continued to drift out of the charred skeletons of the buildings from the occasional flare-up.

More bodies may be found

While more bodies might be recovered, authorities said, crews have finished a search for anyone living trapped inside.

Authorities said Friday that they had concluded search and rescue operations, and that they were trying to identify 89 bodies, out of a total of 200 people who were unaccounted for.

Katy Lo, 70, a resident of Wang Fuk Court, was not home when the fire started Wednesday. She rushed back roughly an hour later to see that the blaze had spread to her building.

“That’s my home.… I still can’t really believe what happened,” Lo said on Friday as she registered for government assistance for affected households. “This all still feels like a bad dream.”

The dead included two Indonesian migrant workers, the Indonesian foreign ministry said Thursday. About 11 other migrants from the country who were working as domestic helpers in the apartment complex remained missing, Indonesian Consul General Yul Edison said Friday.

The city lowered flags to half staff in mourning, and Chief Executive John Lee, led a three-minute silence Saturday from the government headquarters with officials all dressed in black.

The fire was the deadliest in Hong Kong in decades. A 1996 fire in a commercial building in Kowloon killed 41 people. A warehouse fire in 1948 killed 176 people, according to the South China Morning Post.