Iran Press/Asia: The building owner, surnamed Yang, has been held by the public security department.
At least six people were killed in the collapse, and 48 have been rescued. Xinjia Hotel collapsed at around 7:15 pm on Saturday, trapping about 70 people in the rubble, Global Times reported.
But it is not yet confirmed whether the collapse resulted from the modification operation or from original structural problems, according to Zhang Yi, an official from the Housing and Construction Bureau of Quanzhou.
Construction on the building began in 2013. It was transformed into Xinjia Hotel and opened in June 2018 with 66 rooms.
There are six rooms on the first floor of the building, two of which were originally used as a supermarket. Before the Spring Festival this year, the building owner took back the supermarket that had been rented out on the first floor and remodeled it.
At 7 pm on Saturday, the owner received a phone call from construction workers at the site saying that a pillar on the first floor of the building was deformed. Three or four minutes later, the entire building collapsed, according to Zhang.
The collapsed hotel building had been designated as a local medical observation site for holding people undergoing quarantine after arriving from other regions hit hard by the COVID-19 outbreak, authorities said Saturday.
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Hotel used for Coronavirus quarantine collapses in China, 70 trapped
