Investigations are under way into the deaths of five men crushed by a concrete wall at metal recycling plant
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| The scene at Hawkeswood Metal Recycling in the Nechells area of Birmingham where the five men died. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA |
Days before he died, Alimamo Jammeh threw his arms around his landlord and beamed: “I’m going to need a bigger room.” His wife and two children were moving from Gambia to live with him in Birmingham after months apart. He was over the moon, friends said.
But on Thursday morning, a day after celebrating Eid with friends, Alimamo went to work and never came home. He was one of five men crushed to death by a hugeconcrete wall that collapsed 15 minutes into their shift at a metal recycling plant on the outskirts of the city.
The bodies of the final two men were recovered from the rubble on Friday afternoon, after hours of painstaking work by emergency services using heavy lifting gear.
Senior police chiefs confirmed that detectives will examine the health and safety record of Hawkeswood Metal Recycling, where the disaster happened, following three serious incidents in recent years.
Outside the recycling site, crowds of friends and family gathered behind a police cordon on Friday desperate for information about an incident that shook the city’s 10,000-strong Gambian community.
There were emotional scenes as the tearful brother of one of the victims pleaded with police officers to quickly recover his body from the rubble. Boubakary Sera, 56, wept as he told officers that his brother, Bangaly Dukureh, had planned to return to Gambia in October but added: “Now this has killed him.”
He told reporters he had last spoken with his brother at Eid to wish him well. The father of nine said: “He was very healthy, there was nothing wrong with him. Then one day he came here and he’s dead.”
The dead were named locally as Saibo Sillah, Ousman Jabbie, Mohammed Jagana, Alimamo Jammeh and Bangaly Dukureh.
All of the men were married with children. Four were originally from Gambia, while one was Senegalese, and it is believed all five lived in Spain before moving to Britain. They came separately to Birmingham but ended up at Hawkeswood Metal Recycling through an external agency.
Alimamo’s blue Renault clio was still parked outside the site’s gates where he had left it on Thursday morning, 15 minutes before he was killed in one of Birmingham’s worst industrial accidents of recent times.
As investigations into the disaster got underway, friends and relatives described the victims as honest, hardworking men who came to Britain to provide for their families.
Some were working full-time while taking English language classes in the evening. Others appeared to work zero-hours contracts at the site.
Alimamo and Ousman moved to Britain only four months ago, leaving Spainbecause of the language barrier. They immediately found work and rented a flat together above a supermarket in Aston, an inner-city area of Birmingham that has been blighted by gang violence, and prayed at Witton Islamic centre in the shadows of Aston Villa’s football stadium.
Mafugi Jammeh, 46, a friend of Jagana and Dukureh, said the men would be paid by the hour and sometimes turn up at work only to be told they were not needed after a couple of hours. They worked at the site because their English was not great, he said: “Some of them have a language barrier so they can’t get into other jobs straight away, so they have to start at this place.”
It is understood that CID officers identified one of the dead men through a tenancy agreement found in his pocket, which led them to his landlord, Gulbahar Khan.
“They were happy. They never gave me any trouble at any time. Some times they helped me with my bags, they were nice men,” said Khan. “Alimamo hugged me, he said: ‘I’m going to another apartment, my wife is coming and this room is not enough for my kids and me.’ He was very happy. He was saying he wanted his children with him.”
Bamba Mass, 48, a family friend of Alimamo, said their grief-stricken relatives had implored them to try to gain access to the site and check the wreckage in case he is still alive. Mass described his friend as “very down to earth, respectful, hard-working, a very ambitious young man”. He worked at the site because he wanted to make an honest living for his wife and children in Gambia, who were due to come to live with him in Birmingham on Sunday.
“He has done everything to help his family. This Sunday he was expecting his wife and kids to come here to stay. He was over the moon. He was talking to them the day before he died,” he said.
“If you have no money and you want your family to survive you have no choice. If you want to have food and want to survive you have to do a job otherwise you beg on the street. In English you say, ‘a beggar has no choice’.”
“We expect people to keep coming until we get answers to how and why this happened,” Mass said. “The health and safety issues. I think that’s why these sites request a dress code – but if they have those rules the lives of the staff must have had much more priority.”
Lamin Danso, a friend of the men, added: “These are very honest people. They don’t go do illegal things. They want to work and provide for their families. It’s a job, as long as it’s legal. To many of them health and safety was not up to standard [but] it’s a job and they have to work for their family.”
Lamboc Tocray had been celebrating Eid with his stepfather, Bangaly Dukureh, the evening before the accident. “We were very close,” he said outside the site’s gates. “We would meet up and go to the mosque together. I speak to my mother all the time. She’s in Africa, she’s very sad. She has people around her to calm her down.”
Yusupha Cham, 39, originally from Gambia, said there was a 10,000-strong Gambian community in Birmingham, a small number of whom work at the Hawkeswood metal site.
“It’s one community. We are all the same. It’s shocking and tragic. It seems that there’s a history of health and safety issues on the site so this is the concern of everybody,” he said. “You have a lot of Gambians who work here – they just need a job.”
In a meeting held after Friday prayers at the Gambian community mosque in Smethwick, near Birmingham city centre, senior police chiefs told worshippers that detectives would examine “the history of the company” as part of a broad investigation into the tragedy.
In February there was a large fire at the 700-tonne scrap metal recycling plant. In April 2010 the firm was fined £50,000 for breaching health and safety regulations after a worker’s arm was broken when it got trapped in a piece of machinery.
In a statement, the employer of the men, Shredmet, which is owned by Hawkeswood Metal Recycling, said: “They represented the very best of the local community and we are absolutely devastated at their loss.”
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