LONDON, May 19 (Reuters) – British prosecutors said on Tuesday that they were confident of announcing who might face criminal charges over the 2017 blaze that ravaged London’s Grenfell Tower killing 72 people before next June, the 10th anniversary of the disaster.
The fire was Britain’s deadliest in a residential building since World War Two and prompted a national reckoning over building standards and the safety and conditions of social housing for low-income communities.
A public inquiry’s final report in 2024 blamed the disaster on failings by the government, the construction industry and, most of all, the firms involved in fitting the exterior with flammable cladding, which had been marketed as safe.
At a briefing for reporters on Tuesday, Garry Moncrieff, the officer in overall command of the police investigation, said 57 people and 20 companies or organisations “remain as suspects” for offences including corporate and gross negligence manslaughter, fraud and health and safety offences.
He said detectives would hand over files of evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) by the end of September for it to consider what charges should be brought.
Frank Ferguson, Chief Crown Prosecutor for CPS, which previously said it hoped to make charging decisions by the end this year, said that “it is not possible to be definitive about timescales”, but was “confident” this would occur by the 10th anniversary.
Police say their investigation into the deadly blaze was the largest and most complex ever undertaken in the history of the London force.
(Reporting by Sam Tobin; writing by Michael Holden; editing by Sarah Young)
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