Hong Kong firefighters found dozens more bodies on Friday during an intensive apartment search in a high-rise complex where a major fire engulfed seven buildings. Authorities arrested another eight people involved in the renovation of the towers.
The death toll in one of the city’s deadliest fires rose to 128 and many are still missing.
First responders found that some fire alarms in the complex, which housed many elderly people, did not sound during tests, said Andy Yeung, the director of Fire in Hong Kong services, although he did not say how many were not working or whether others were.
The fire quickly spread from one building to the next when a bamboo structure covered with netting and foam board, apparently installed by a construction company, caught fire.
Authorities arrested seven men and one woman aged 40 to 63 on Friday, including scaffolding subcontractors, directors of an engineering firm and project managers who oversaw the renovation, the Independent Commission Against Corruption said in a statement.
On Friday, crews prioritized apartments from which they had received emergency calls during the blaze but were unable to reach them in the hours that the blaze spiraled out of control, Derek Armstrong Chan, deputy director of the Hong Kong Fire Department, told reporters. It took firefighters about 24 hours to bring the fire under control and it wasn’t fully extinguished until Friday morning.
Even two days after the fire began, smoke continued to rise from the charred skeletons of buildings in occasional bursts of flames.
About 200 people remain missing, Security Minister Chris Tang told reporters. These include 89 bodies that have not yet been identified. More bodies could still be recovered, authorities said, although crews have completed the search for people trapped inside.
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More than 2,300 firefighters and medical personnel were involved in the operation, and 12 firefighters were among the 79 injured, Yeung said. He had previously said that a firefighter was also killed.
Katy Lo, 70, a resident of Wang Fuk Court, was not at home when the fire broke out on Wednesday. About an hour later, she rushed back to find the fire had spread to her building.
“This is my home. … I still can’t really believe what happened,” Lo said Friday as she signed up for government assistance for affected households. “This all still feels like a bad dream.”
The apartment complex of eight 31-story buildings in Tai Po District, a suburb near Hong Kong’s border with mainland China, was built in the 1980s and underwent a major renovation. It had almost 2,000 apartments and around 4,800 residents.
Flames engulf a building after a fire broke out at Wang Fuk Court, a housing estate in Tai Po district of the New Territories in Hong Kong, Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2025.
AP Photo/Chan is hot
Three men – the directors and a technical adviser of a construction company – were arrested on suspicion of manslaughter on Thursday, and police said the company’s executives were accused of gross negligence.
Police have not identified the company where the suspects worked, but documents posted on the homeowners association website showed that Prestige Construction & Engineering Company was responsible for the renovations. Police confiscated boxes of documents from the company, whose phones rang on Thursday and no one answered.
In addition to the new arrests on Friday, the anti-corruption agency also searched the suspects’ offices and seized relevant documents and bank records.
Authorities suspected that some materials on the exterior walls of the high-rise buildings did not meet fire resistance standards, allowing the fire to spread unusually quickly.
Police said they found highly flammable plastic foam panels attached to windows on each floor of the one unaffected tower. The panels were believed to have been installed by the construction company, but the purpose was unclear.
Preliminary investigations showed the fire started on a scaffolding net on the lower level of one of the buildings and then spread quickly when the foam panels caught fire, Security Minister Tang said.
Firefighters work to extinguish a fire that broke out at Wang Fuk Court, a housing estate in Tai Po District, Hong Kong’s New Territories, on Wednesday, Thursday, November 27, 2025.
AP Photo / Chan is Hei Hei Hei
“The fire ignited the foam panels, causing the glass to shatter, resulting in the rapid intensification of the fire and its spread to the interior,” Tang said.
Authorities planned immediate inspections of residential complexes undergoing major renovations to ensure that scaffolding and building materials meet safety standards.
The fire was the deadliest in Hong Kong in decades. A fire at a commercial building in Kowloon in 1996 killed 41 people. According to the South China Morning Post, a camp fire in 1948 killed 176 people.
&Copy 2025 The Canadian Press
