Iran building collapse kills 11 as mayor and others detained

Iranian media say the death toll from the collapse of a commercial building still under construction in southwestern Iran has reached 11, after more bodies were retrieved from the rubble in the city of Abadan

Rescuers dug through debris, on May 24, of a building collapse in southwestern Iran that killed at least 11 people, fearful that many more could still be trapped beneath the rubble as authorities arrested the city's mayor in a widening probe of the disaster.

The collapse on May 23 of an under-construction 10-storey tower at the Metropol Building exposed its cement blocks and steel beams while also underscoring an ongoing crisis in Iranian construction projects that has seen other disasters in this earthquake-prone nation.

Video from the initial collapse on Monday showed thick dust rise over Abadan, a crucial oil-producing city in Khuzestan province, near Iran's border with Iraq. The Metropol Building included two towers, one already built and the other under construction, though its bottom commercial floors had finished and already had tenants.

On Tuesday, an emergency official interviewed on state television suggested that some 50 people may have been inside of the building at the time of the collapse, including people moving into its basement floors. However, it wasn’t clear if that figure included those already pulled from the rubble. “At least 39 people were injured, most of them lightly,” officials earlier said.

Aerial drone footage aired on Tuesday showed the floors had pancaked on top of each other, leaving a pile of dusty, gray debris. A construction crane stood still nearby as a single backhoe dug. State TV said at least 11 people had been killed.

An angry crowd at the site chased and beat Abadan Mayor Hossein Hamidpour immediately after the collapse, according to the semiofficial ILNA news agency and online videos.

Police later arrested Mr. Hamidpour and nine others, Iranian media reported on Tuesday. Initially, authorities said the building's owner and its general contractor had been arrested as well, though a later report from the judiciary's Mizan news agency said on Tuesday that the two men had been killed in the collapse. The conflicting reports could not be immediately reconciled.