Beijing, Apr 07: Twenty-one people were killed when a devastating fire gutted a food processing factory in east China's Shandong province on Saturday, an official report said today. The blaze started at 12:50 am in the Gingdao Chia Tai Company Ltd. when 500 employees were on night shift.
The steel-framed workshop collapsed in the fire, trapping some of the staff, said officials from the Qingdao City, the provincial capital. The fire was extinguished and all the bodies had been retrieved by Sunday evening, the state-owned news agency reported.
The company has 4,000 employees and is located in the Longquan town of Jimo, a city under Qingdao. The provincial and Qingdao City government have sent a team to investigate cause of the accident, the report said. Bureau Report