Eleven employees of the OCT East theme park in which six people were killed in an amusement ride crash in Yantian District last Tuesday have been detained, official sources said yesterday (July 6).
The sources said those detained were involved in the operation of the Space Journey ride. The employees were suspected of dereliction of duty. The sources asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
The arrests were confirmed by Shenzhen police, who gave no further details.
An official investigation into the accident is still ongoing despite the recovery of the ride's black box at the weekend. The ride span 12 carriages, each carrying four people, around a centrifuge to allow riders to experience 2G of acceleration, the same speed as a rocket launch.
Space Journey was manufactured by the Beijing Jiuhua Amusement Rides Manufacturing Co. and had passed safety checks by the China Special Equipment Inspection and Research Institute and the China Astronaut Center.
In a separate development, 11 family members of the crash victims were detained by police on grounds of disrupting public order when they blocked the road leading to the park entrance to ask for an explanation from the park operator Sunday afternoon.
"I understood how they felt, but it won't do them any good to overreact," said Chen, a park employee who had been asked to mediate with the families. "I tried to talk them back to their hotels and wait for the investigation results, but they wouldn't listen."
The park operator also refused to disclose the compensation payments to be made to the crash victims' families saying no agreement has been reached. "There's nothing we can do right now because some of the family members of the victims are refusing to talk to the company," said a manager of the park, whom the paper did not identify.
