Birmingham wall collapse: £20,000 raised for victims' families
A fundraising drive for the bereaved families of five workers crushed to death when a wall collapsed has raised more than £20,000 in just three days.
Public donations have rolled in since the tragedy at the Hawkeswood Metal recycling plant in the heavily industrialised Nechells area of Birmingham on Thursday.
All of the men were Spanish nationals but originally from Gambia.
Leaders of the city's 10,000-strong Gambian community said yesterday that police were continuing work to formally identify the victims and had been collecting DNA samples from relatives, and descriptions of what the men had been wearing.
Ansumana Barrow, president of the city's Gambian Association, said that all the families had now been contacted and financial and practical support given.
The victims have been named locally as Saibo Sillah, 42, Ousman Jabbie, Mohammed Jangana, Alimano Jammeh and Bangaly Dukureh, 50, and were all married with children.
A sixth man suffered a broken leg after tons of concrete and metal fell on top of the work crew, who were believed to have been clearing an outside storage bay, but he managed to pull himself free.
In a painstaking two-day operation, beginning immediately after the collapse on Thursday morning and ending on Friday afternoon, emergency crews had to remove one-and-a-half ton concrete blocks and tons of rubble to retrieve the remains.
