11 Chinese officials implicated in Tianjin blast incident

Eleven officials in China have been accused of neglecting their duties with regard to the storage and transportation of hazardous material at the site of a recent deadly blast in the northeastern Chinese city of Tianjin.

According to a Thursday report by China’s official Xinhua news agency, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate charged the officials with “dereliction of duty” and “abuse of power” over the fatal explosion at a warehouse in the port city.

Notable among the accused individuals are Zheng Qingyue, the president of Tianjin Port Holdings Company, and Wu Dai, the head of Tianjin Municipal Transportation Commission.

Earlier in the day, Chinese police arrested 12 people affiliated with Tianjin Ruihai International Logistics Company, the firm that own the warehouse, for illegally keeping dangerous chemicals. According to reports, five high-ranking officials of the company, including board chairman Yu Xuewei, vice board chairman Dong Shexuan and three deputy general managers, are among those arrested.

Beijing further announced that it has launched an investigation into how the warehouse had managed to pass safety evaluation checks, speculating that Tianjin Zhongbin Haisheng, a safety evaluation company, may have colluded with Ruihai in the process.

On August 12, a major explosion took place at a warehouse in Tianjin, killing 139 people and devastating huge areas surrounding the site of the incident. Reports say that the warehouse stored such hazardous materials as sodium cyanide.

Following the explosion, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to implement more safety measures, calling on the country’s officials to learn from the “extremely profound” lessons of the deadly incident.

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