London, June 23 (IANS): The Grenfell Tower fire in London that killed 79 people started in a faulty fridge, the Metropolitan Police said on Friday, adding the cladding on the 24-storey block has failed all safety tests.
Both the insulation and tiles at the tower had failed safety tests, with the insulation proving more flammable than the cladding, Scotland Yard’s Detective Superintendent Fiona McCormack said in a statement.
The police will consider manslaughter charges, the Evening Standard newspaper quoted her as saying.
The catastrophic Grenfell Tower blaze led to the death of at least 79 people last week while many more were left homeless. The number of dead is likely to still rise, said McCormack. “I fear there are more.”
She said police had established that the initial cause of the blaze was a fridge-freezer in a flat at the fourth level and that the fire was not started deliberately, Xinhua news agency reported.
McCormack said the police were also considering health and safety breaches against companies, organisations or individuals in relation to the fire, “the worse fire in London since World War II”.
The investigation will probe whether the use of the cladding material at the Grenfell Tower had been illegal, the report said.
She said the police had already shared its findings with the government’s Department for Communities and Local Government, recommending they immediately share the findings with town and city councils across the country.
McCormack said she feared more people could have been killed in the fire amid concerns some of the people living there had been in the country illegally.
She issued a plea for information saying the police and the national immigration department had promised the legal status of victims of the fire would not be questioned.
The way the fire spread and the rapid speed of its spread through the building, leading to whole families being incinerated by the flames, is forming part of what was described as “one of the biggest and most complex investigations” by the Met police.
An estimated 600 tower blocks across the country have facia cladding similar to that used in the Grenfell Tower.
Some local authorities have already started to remove cladding from buildings as a safety precaution and to assure residents afraid to live in high rise towers.
