7, including Chinese, charged over building collapse in Cambodia
SIHANOUKVILLE, Cambodia: Seven people, including five Chinese nationals, have been charged with manslaughter or as accomplices to manslaughter in connection with a building collapse in Cambodia that killed 28 people and sparked anger over shoddy construction regulations.
The collapse of a seven-storey, under-construction Chinese building in the resort town of Sihanoukville on Saturday is the deadliest industrial accident in recent memory in Cambodia.
A close Beijing ally, Cambodia has seen an influx of investments from Chinese developers, including in the booming gambling hub of Sihanoukville.
But the building frenzy has raised concerns about substandard safety regulations in a country where most construction workers are informal daylabourers.
Chinese building owner Cheng Kun was yesterday charged with involuntary manslaughter, causing bodily harm and causing destruction of property, according to a court warrant seen by AFP.
Three other Chinese citizens — contractor Deng Xin Gui, site manager Xie Ya Ping and engineer Gao Yu — were accused as accomplices on all three offences.
“Now they are in jail provisionally,” Lim Bun Heng, a court spokesman in Preah Sihanouk province, told AFP.
Another Chinese citizen, a Vietnamese man and a Cambodian landowner have also been charged as accomplices to manslaughter but remain on the run.
According to Cambodian law, all seven could face a threeyear maximum sentence for manslaughter.
Cambodian authorities have launched an investigation into the fatal accident, which Prime Minister Hun Sen has blamed on “carelessness”.
Recriminations have been swift, with Preah Sihanouk’s governor Yun Min resigning Monday over managerial errors.
Another top disaster management official has been fired for not being “quick enough to respond”, said Hun Sen, warning others “to be more responsible”.
There are an estimated 200,000 construction workers in Cambodia, mostly unskilled, reliant on day wages and not protected by union rules, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
At least 26 people were injured in the building collapse, which prompted a desperate, dayslong search for survivors in the mound of rubble.
On Monday afternoon, two people were pulled from the wreckage alive — bruised and weak but spared of serious injuries — more than two days after the building went down.
Sihanoukville was once a sleepy fishing town turned backpackerfavourite, but today is a hotspot for throngs of Chinese tourists.
There are more than 50 Chinese-owned casinos around the beachfront and dozens more under construction, including around the site of Saturday’s building collapse. — AFP DZHEZKAZGAN, Kazakhstan: The first crew to blast off to the International Space Station following a launch accident that deepened doubts over Russia’s space programme returned to earth safely Tuesday.
Nasa astronaut Anne McClain, veteran cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko of Roscosmos, and Canadian Space Agency recordholder David Saint-Jacques emerged from the space craft to applause from support crews, after touching down near the Kazakh city of Dzhezkazgan.
Live footage from the landing site broadcast on Nasa television showed the three sitting in chairs smiling as they were attended to by staff ahead MEXICO CITY: Mexico has deployed nearly 15,000 soldiers and National Guardsmen to its border with the United States, the army chief said Monday — admitting they are detaining migrants who try to cross, after the policy triggered backlash.
Under pressure from US President Donald Trump to slow the surge of Central Americans crossing the border, Mexico promised earlier this month to reinforce its southern border with 6,000 National Guardsmen, but had not previously disclosed the extent of the crackdown on its northern border.
“We have a total deployment, between the National Guard and army units, of 14,000, almost 15,000 men in the north of the country,” Defence Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval said at a press conference alongside President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Asked whether those forces were detaining migrants to prevent them from crossing, Sandoval replied: “Yes.”
“Given that (undocumented) migration is not a crime but rather of a journey back to Moscow for Kononenko and Houston for McClain and Saint-Jacques.
Arriving at 0247 GMT to warm conditions, Kononenko joked that he was “happy to see any kind of weather” after coming back from space.
The trio’s launch on Dec 3 was the first after a Soyuz rocket carrying Russia’s Aleksey Ovchinin and US astronaut Nick Hague failed in October just minutes after blast-off, forcing the pair to make an emergency landing.
They escaped unharmed but the failed launch was the first such incident in Russia’s post-Soviet history and a new setback for the country’s once an administrative violation, we simply detain them and turn them over” to immigration authorities, he said.
The government has faced criticism for stopping migrants from crossing the US-Mexican border. National Guardsmen and police have been patrolling the border in groups.
The policy is a shift from previous practice. The Mexican security forces have long detained undocumented migrants as they travel in the country, but had not typically stopped them from crossing the US border in the past.
The practice caused an outcry after an AFP photographer documented last week how heavily armed National Guardsmen in Ciudad Juarez forcefully stopped two women and a young girl from crossing the Rio Grande river into the United States.
In some cases, migrant families have been separated when some members manage to cross the border and others get detained on the Mexican side. — AFP proud space industry.
McClain, Kononenko and Saint-Jacques had been optimistic ahead of their successful launch and remained upbeat throughout their time aboard the orbital lab which is seen as a rare example of cooperation between Russia and the West.
Fellow first- time flyer SaintJacques broke the record for the longest single spaceflight by a Canadian astronaut, previously held by Robert Thirsk.
Thirsk clocked 187 days at the ISS in 2009 during a typical sixmonth mission, while 49-yearold Saint-Jacques’ mission will stand at 204 days.— AFP