Search for Survivors in Collapsed Korea Mall Ended
Searchers packed up their equipment and began leaving a collapsed shopping mall Saturday, angering relatives of 144 people still missing.
About 80 family members, wielding steel pipes, kicked and punched riot police and demanded that the city resume the search. One policeman was injured in the clash, the Yonhap news agency reported.
The protesters later staged a sit-in on the bare concrete floor, uncovered after three weeks of rubble removal. They burned furniture and threatened to explode two metal barrels containing gas if police tried to intervene.
The death toll from the June 29 cave-in of the Sampoong Department Store stood at 458. The missing include 59 bodies recovered but not yet identified, along with 50 sets of partial remains.
Officials fear many victims will remain unaccounted for after those remains are identified through DNA matches and other methods, which doctors say could take months.
Workers said no bodies remained to be recovered from the site. Relief headquarters instead sent 170 workers with digging equipment to a local landfill to join family members in a search for remains amid tons of rubble taken there.
Relatives sifting through the garbage dump had earlier found hundreds of personal effects and 20 pieces of what they claimed were partial human remains.
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