Factory Owners Arrested in China Fire

Thu Oct 25, 2007 1:51 PM EDT

Images

(showing 1 of 2 photos)

BEIJING — Police in southeastern China have arrested the owners of an unlicensed shoe factory where a fire killed 37 people, state media said Thursday.

The fire, which broke out Sunday in the city of Putian in Fujian province, was one of the deadliest industrial accidents this year in a country plagued with dangerous workplaces.

Nineteen people were also injured in the blaze.

Police in Putian arrested the factory's owners, Chen Zongfei and Huang Shubin, for failing to prevent the fire, the official Xinhua news agency reported. It said Qiu Jincai, an official in charge of work safety in the city, had been suspended.

A man who answered the phone at the Putian police office refused to comment, referring questions to the city's Communist Party office. No one answered calls to the party's media office.

Putian is a center of shoe manufacturing in China and the export business has helped turn Fujian into one of the country's most prosperous provinces. With more than 3,000 shoe factories in the area, Putian exported more than $1.1 billion in shoes last year, according to state media.

While China's coal mines are known to be the world's most dangerous, safety violations are also rife in the country's many factories. Thousands die each year in fires, explosions and other accidents often blamed on insufficient safety equipment and workers ignoring safety rules.

Last year, more than 14,000 people died in about 12,000 industrial accidents, not including fires, according to the State Administration of Work Safety. The agency recorded three major blazes in 2006, killing a total of 38 people.

The death toll in Sunday's fire was among the highest in an industrial accident so far this year. The worst accident took place in August, when 181 coal miners died in two flooded mines.