The Intense Day of the City Council and the Rubble of the Plasco Building

The sixth day of efforts to clear the rubble of the destroyed Plasco building in Tehran is underway with high tension. The debris removal has reached the ground floor, and the only statistic that remains unchanged is the discovery of six victims' bodies. Other statistics are on the rise, with 11,000 tons of rubble moved, hundreds of gas canisters, and dozens of safes discovered; among these, a firefighter's helmet and several breathing apparatuses have been found, with no identification of their owners, according to the fire department's public relations officer, Jalal Maleki. Information remains uncertain, while the government-affiliated Iran newspaper reported on Tuesday from the 109th precinct of Baharestan about the formation of a queue for registering missing persons. On the same day, Qader Karimi, the deputy chief of police in Tehran, emphasized that nearly 500 people were inside the Plasco building at the moments leading up to its collapse and stated that eight families of Plasco merchants have reported missing persons. Meanwhile, forensic officials reported matching the identities of four bodies found in the Plasco building with missing persons. As debris removal continues, Tehran municipality officials announced that the temperature of the underlying layers of rubble is around 540 degrees Celsius, a temperature that has even deformed safes and kept the death toll unchanged. The fruitless efforts to find the bodies of the deceased firefighters led fire department officials to announce the death toll as 16, including one person who died in the hospital on the first day, and they organized their funeral for Thursday. However, on Tuesday, it was not only the heat of the Plasco building's debris that was high. The public session of the Tehran City Council also experienced a tense day. City Council members on Tuesday not only called for the impeachment of the President and ministers related to the fire incident but also demanded the resignation of Tehran Mayor Ghalibaf. The session heated up with the remarks of Rahmatollah Hafezi, who stated that the actual number of victims of the Plasco building should be reported as 20 to 30, and that an audio file from the session on Saturday in the Parvaneh parking lot should be released, a session for which no details have been published so far. Hafezi, the head of the Health Commission of the Tehran City Council, also called on the judiciary to prosecute those responsible for the Plasco incident without political conservatism. Reza Taghipour, the spokesperson for the City Council, went even further, calling for the impeachment of the President and ministers of the tenth cabinet in an interview with the Fars news agency, stating that their negligence in securing the Plasco building caused the disaster. Mohammad Mahdi Tondgouyan, the spokesperson for the reformist faction of the Tehran City Council, also claimed in an interview with ISNA that there was not a single production workshop in the Plasco building and that all units were stores, stating that there were no night-shift workers in the building, only a janitor and two cleaners were stationed there. This council member also emphasized that there were no fuel sources on the floors, and diesel was only present in the engine room and basement, which he claimed still exists. These statements came hours after Saeed Karimi, one of the firefighters present at the incident site, said on Islamic Republic television about the occurrence of explosions in the upper floors of the Plasco building: 'When I was above the device, small explosions were happening, but I don't exactly remember when it was; then white smoke came, and there was a very huge explosion, its sound even shook me, and after that, the fire returned.' Previously, on the third of Bahman, the Minister of Intelligence denied any sabotage in the Plasco building. The commander of the Tehran police also reported the day before that no one had been arrested in connection with the Plasco fire incident.