A building collapsed in central Nairobi on Monday while more than 280 workers were inside, leaving at least eight people dead, witnesses and construction workers said.
More than 50 seriously injured people were rushed to hospitals, medics said.
Dozens of rescuers dug into the rubble with their bare hands while the injured were loaded into any available car to be taken to area hospitals. Eight corpses were visible at the scene. A hand could be seen waiving for help from under a concrete beam.
One of the workers said 280 men were on the site. Another of the workers, who would not give his name, said an inspector had warned last week that the structure was not safe and they were trying to stabilise the building.
Hundreds of bystanders formed lines to carry away chunks of concrete and wooden scaffolding, which a front-loader then pushed away from the site.
One survivor was pulled from the building more than an hour after the collapse, but there were fears that more people were caught between the floors of the building that collapsed on top of one another.
There was no immediate indication of a possible death toll.
The lower floors of the five-storey building were filled with construction workers while work was under way to add additional upper floors when it collapsed, said 26-year-old Patrick Opiyo while he was digging for survivors. Parts of the exterior walls were still standing, presenting a hazard to rescuers.
Opiyo said he had been working at the site when the building suddenly collapsed, trapping his colleagues inside.
Nigeria
A crippled four-year-old was among eight people killed on Sunday when a residential building in Lokoja, central Nigeria, collapsed, local media reported.
The grandmother of the child, who suffered from polio, was also killed in the accident, while the child’s mother was reportedly in a coma in hospital.
Rescue teams retrieved eight bodies from the rubble and 20 people were being treated in hospital for injuries.
Reports said the owner of the building had recently added two extra floors on to what used to be a bungalow.
Although the house showed some signs of weakness when the first floor was added, the owner proceeded with adding the second floor, reports said.
A local police officer, Ahmed Kareem, condemned the practice by Nigerian property developers of making adjustments to buildings without obtaining the necessary permits or employing the services of trained professionals.
Police hoped to arrest the owner of the building and his building contractor, neither of whom lived in the town, Kareem added.
Lagos
On Saturday, police in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital, launched a hunt for the owner of a building that collapsed on Friday, killing at least seven people and trapping dozens more, a state police spokesperson said.
”We are seriously looking for the owner of the building or its contractor. The Lagos state police commissioner, Emmanuel Adebayo, has given a firm instruction that we must get them, interrogate them and bring them to justice,” Bode Ojajuni said by telephone.
”They must be brought to judgement. We also need to clear them from the rumour that the building was not approved as a four-storey building,” Ojajuni said.
He confirmed that five bodies recovered from the rubble of the building in the densely populated Amukoko district of south-west Lagos had been taken to the morgue.
Witnesses and media reports said that at least seven people died, among them a day-old child, his parents and a family friend, according to Channels television.
The top floor of the four-storey building was still under construction when it went down, witnesses said. The cause of the collapse is still unknown. — Sapa-AFP, Sapa-dpa