Death toll at Grenfell will stay at around 80, say police
After Lily and Co complained about a cover-up...
‘Should not have happened’
THE number of residents who died in the Grenfell Tower tragedy is likely to remain at around 80, police confirmed yesterday.
They dismissed speculation that the death toll was much higher and had been downplayed for political reasons.
Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott had claimed that ‘hundreds’ had died in the blaze, while Labour backbencher David Lammy said the official number was ‘far too low’ and that it was ‘fuelling suspicion of a cover-up’.
He added that information was being withheld to avoid ‘anger or unrest’.
Left-wing websites and pop singer Lily Allen also claimed the number of casualties had been ‘downplayed by the mainstream media’.
But giving a detailed breakdown of the scale of the tragedy yesterday, Scotland Yard dismissed the ‘speculation’.
Investigators believe 350 people were in the West London tower last month when fire tore through it in the early hours. This includes residents and visitors.
Of those, 255 people managed to escape and another 14 were thankfully not in their flats when the blaze broke out.
Metropolitan Police Commander Stuart Cundy said: ‘That still gives us a figure of about 80 people we either know are dead or are missing and we presume are dead.’
He said there were uncorroborated reports that ten more people may have escaped but not yet come forward to the authorities. ‘The positive is that this is people who escaped. We are not hearing anything at the moment, either formally or informally, about other groups of people who failed to escape the fire,’ he added.
‘We know there has been lots of commentary about hundreds and hundreds of people missing.
‘One of the numbers that some people have speculated is about 600. We have not received from anybody a list of hundreds of people who are believed to be missing.’ The probe into the fire is the biggest non-terror related criminal investigation in Scotland Yard’s history, Mr Cundy said. The force is considering potential offences ranging from manslaughter to lower level crimes.
Listening to harrowing calls made by those trapped in the burning building was fuelling officers’ determination to bring any wrongdoers to justice, Mr Cundy added.
‘ You can’t listen to the accounts of the survivors and the families and those who lost loved ones and listen to the 999 calls, as our investigators have done, and not want to hold people to account for a fire that should not have happened,’ he said. ‘That is quite emotive but it’s very true. The 999 calls are deeply distressing.’
Some of the victims’ remains may never be found after the inferno reached 1,000C (1,832F), leaving no trace of them. Experts are sifting through tons of debris by hand to detect anything that may be human.
British police have taken advice from experts in New York who recovered remains and identified victims after the September 11 terror attacks in 2001.
Conspiracy theories about the Grenfell death toll started soon after the blaze when a hard-Left pro-Corbyn internet blog called Skwawkbox said officials had issued a ‘D-notice’ – an official request to editors not to publish sensitive information – banning publication of the true figure.
The story was false, as confirmed by the Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, which issues D-notices, but it was shared 16,000 times on Facebook and picked up by several online news outlets.
Miss Allen said she ‘had been hearing from people’ that close to 150 had died, ‘and many of those are children’. Tottenham MP Mr Lammy declared himself ‘sympathetic’ to the theory of a cover-up, while Miss Abbott said: ‘ Grenfell Tower is not just an unfortunate incident. Those hundreds of people that died are a direct consequence of Tory attitudes in social housing.’