Hundreds of protesters, including some carrying the bodies of victims, gathered on Saturday May 9 outside a chemical plant in India to demand the closure of the site after a gas leak on Thursday resulting in the deaths of twelve people.
Protesters chanted slogans demanding justice for the victims of the leak and the closure of the STR / AFP factory
The accident, which occurred in the port city of Visakhapatnam in the south-east of the country, also injured hundreds of people and exposed terrible scenes of people and animals lying unconscious in the streets.
Indian authorities were on site Saturday to conduct a safety visit to the factory of LG Polymers, an Indian subsidiary of the South Korean company LG Chemical, when a crowd of around 300 people broke into the police. and security guards. Some had brought with them three bodies of accident victims, recovered earlier from the morgue and transported on stretchers and hidden under black tarpaulins.
Protesters chanted slogans demanding justice for the victims of the factory leak and closure, before being pushed back by the security forces.
In the evening of Thursday, the exclusion zone around the plant had been widened and hundreds of people were displaced for fear of a new gas leak.
The situation is now "under control" in the factory, said Gautam Sawang, the chief of police of the State of Andhra Pradesh.
Judicial authorities have opened a homicide investigation after the gas leak, and Indian environmental justice has so far ordered the company to pay a $ 6.2 million fine.
According to the police, the leak occurred after an overheating of gas left inside a tank, after the partial shutdown of the factory due to the national confinement decreed in India to fight against the spread of the new coronavirus.
LG Chem confirmed that the polystyrene manufacturing plant was not operating at the time of the accident, but insisted that safety teams were on site.
