Police were Tuesday trying to identify the cause of a fire that killed 40 people and injured 10 others in a refrigerated warehouse under construction southeast of Seoul.
The deadly blaze in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, ripped through the two-story warehouse where 57 workers were installing refrigeration systems and doing other work to prepare for the building's opening this weekend, police said, leaving most of the corpses of the victims burnt so badly as to defy identification.
Seven of the workers were rescued or able to escape, they said, but the rest were trapped in the basement where they died or were injured by the fire or toxic gas inhalation. Many of the dead were underpaid daily wage earners, including 13 ethnic Koreans from China who were missing and presumed to be among the burnt bodies.
"He was saving his daily wages here for his dream to restart his own business in China," said a brother-in-law of Kim Yong-hae, 25, who came to Korea three months ago as a migrant worker and who was now missing and presumed to be dead.
Foreign Minister Song Min-soon planned to send a condolence letter to his Chinese counterpart. The ministry will also dispatch its top ambassador for consular affair, Gabriel Oh, to the scene to help the process of handling the victims' funerals and compensation, ministry officials said.
South Korean human rights activists will launch a joint organization to devise compensation measures for the migrant workers from China, said Pastor Kim Hae-seong, head of the non-governmental Association of Movement for Foreign Migrant Labor.
President-elect Lee Myung-bak paid an impromptu visit to the scene to express condolences to the families of the victims.
Survivors were not aware of what directly caused the three consecutive explosions at 10-second intervals at 10:45 a.m. Monday, as they were outside the machine room presumed to be the origin of the blaze, police said.
Police have so far identified 10 of the 40 victims through their appearance or belongings, while most others were linked to those missing in the list of employees provided by the warehouse owner, the logistics company Korea 2000. DNA tests were being conducted on the rest of the 30 bodies in order to identify them, but the work will take at least two weeks, according to the police.
A joint team of police officers, investigators from the National Institute of Scientific Investigation and government officials from gas and electric agencies will inspect the warehouse to identify the cause of the fire, police said.
Questions also remained about whether the warehouse, whose construction was nearly completed, was properly built and equipped with fire prevention facilities approved by the government. Most workers inside the warehouse were installing pipes and arranging electric facilities.
Some police officers suspected the basement's boiler room caught fire, setting off the explosions. They said flammable gas was ignited by a stray spark from a welder's torch. Workers had been welding in the building, which contained thinners and polyurethanes.
Burning toxic chemicals, coupled with fear of more explosions, made it difficult for firefighters to enter the building and extinguish the blaze.
The operations were delayed as toxic fumes were billowing out of the warehouse, and the temperature inside was too high to search for the missing.
Survivor Ahn Sun-shik, 51, recalled experiencing a backdraft as he escaped. "As soon as I heard one of my colleagues shout 'Fire!' I felt I was being sucked back in by a gust of wind."
Ahn said he ran frantically from the scene, and heard the sound of a bang when he was 50 meters from the warehouse. He added that he had no chance to take any action to save his colleagues.