Seven people have been arrested for a building site collapse that resulted in three deaths in Guangzhou in early July, sources with the Guangzhou municipal government said yesterday.

A building wall at a construction site in the city's Haizhou District toppled on July 21, killing three people and injuring eight.

Six hundred residents were evacuated from the area after a landslide in a nearby street resulting from the collapse.

The local municipal government established a special investigation team to look into the cause of the incident immediately after the collapse.

"The developer of the building project paid no heed to the repeated warnings about risks in the design and construction process," Yu Xuxi, deputy director of the Guangzhou Bureau for Safe Production Supervision, told reporters yesterday.

Guangzhou Nanyi Real Estate Development Company, the project's developer, was found without necessary licences for the building project, according to Yu.

Meanwhile, another four government departments, including the Guangzhou Municipal Construction Committee, were also found to have failed to supervise the building project, Yu said.

(China Daily September 21, 2005)