.

By Omeiza Ajayi, Abuja

The Federal Capital Territory Administration FCTA has concluded rescue operations at the scene of a three-storey shopping mall which collapsed in the wee hours of Friday in Kubwa, the city’s largest suburban town.

Director General, FCT Emergency Management Agency FEMA, Alhaji Abbas Idriss announced this in a terse statement Friday in Abuja.

According to the statement signed by FEMA’s Head of Public Affairs, Nkechi Isa, the remains of two persons who were earlier reported trapped in the rubble have been retrieved.

He informed that the bodies have been deposited at the Kubwa District Hospital mortuary.

According to him, “the rescue operation at the collapsed site came to an end with five persons rescued alive, three with various degrees of injuries, while two persons were unhurt and discharged from the Kubwa District Hospital”.

He said relatives of the deceased have been identified and were making arrangements for their burial.

Meanwhile, Federal Capital Territory FCT Minister, Malam Muhammadu Musa Bello has ordered an integrity test on all high rise buildings in the area.

The collapsed building, according to eyewitnesses, was being converted from a shopping mall to a residential apartment, with the developer adding at least two more floors on an already existing structure which did not have the weight to carry the new additions.

Kubwa, Abuja’s largest suburban town has recently witnessed the conversion of residential buildings to commercial centres and vice versa. The building which caved in, was still under construction, but had some artisans living inside.

As of 2pm on Friday, five of the seven persons earlier trapped under the rubble had been rescued by the disaster management team of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps NSCDC and sister agencies who took the victims to the General Hospital in Kubwa.

A combined team of personnel of the Abuja Metropolitan Management Council AMMC, Federal Roads Maintenance Agency, FERMA, Federal Road Safety Corps, FRSC, the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, NSCDC as well as the National Emergency Management Agency NEMA among others were on ground for the rescue operations.

“It happened at 11.30pm yesterday. We were seven people sleeping here. One person slept at the boys quarter, another slept in the security post, and the rest five persons slept in the main building. Five of us have been rescued.

It remains a security man, and the man that brought me here,” one of the survivors told journalists. Giving an update on the incident, Senior Special Assistant on Monitoring, Inspection and Enforcement to the FCT Minister, Attah Ikharo said officials have retrieved the body of one of the occupants from the rubble.

“The building was initially a shopping mall, but the report we got from residents was that the owner was warned, and at a certain point, it was now being converted to a residential apartment. The ground floor was a shopping mall, but they were putting up some blocks of flats on the first and second suspended floors. You cannot alter a shopping mall and convert it to a residential building thereby giving it more load than what it was meant to carry,” he noted.

Attah added that the FCT Minister has ordered that tests be carried out on most of the high rise buildings around the area.

Preliminary reports had shown that the building was in a swampy area and that the right materials were not used in its construction.