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Owner of Collapsed Bangladesh Factory That Killed 1,100 to Face Murder Charges

Murder charges will be filed against the owner of a Bangladeshi garment factory that collapsed and killed more than 1,100 people in 2013, police said.
IMAGE: Mohammed Sohel Rana
Bangladeshi crisis police parade Mohammed Sohel Rana to the media after his arrest April 28, 2013, in Dhaka, Bangladesh.Reuters — file

Murder charges will be filed against the owner of a Bangladeshi garment factory that collapsed and killed more than 1,100 people in 2013, police said Sunday.

Mohammed Sohel Rana was arrested as he was trying to flee across the border to India a week after the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka collapsed on April 24, 2013.

Bijoy Krishna Kar, lead investigator for the Bangladeshi national police, told Agence France-Presse on Sunday that Rana and his parents would be among 42 people charged with murder.

IMAGE: Mohammed Sohel Rana
Bangladeshi crisis police parade Mohammed Sohel Rana to the media after his arrest April 28, 2013, in Dhaka, Bangladesh.Reuters — file

The charges initially were to have been filed Sunday, but police said later in a statement that because of some "technical changes," they would delayed to Monday. Conviction could bring the death penalty, Kar said.

More than 2,430 workers were rescued alive from the rubble after six of the factory's nine floors collapsed in the modern world's third-deadliest industrial disaster, after the Union Carbide gas leak that killed 3,787 people in Bhopal, India, in 1984 and the explosion of the Benxihu Colliery coal mine in China's Liaoning province, which killed 1,549 people in 1942.

Separately, the national Anti-Corruption Commission sued Rana on May 24 for allegedly accumulating wealth illegally.