DUBAI, June 3: Three Indian labourers have been killed and three are missing and feared dead after the collapse of a hotel ceiling being constructed in the United Arab Emirates, the local press reported on Tuesday.

The incident took place on Monday while workers were pouring concrete into the ceiling of the basement of a hotel being constructed on the coast of Ajman, one of the seven emirates forming the UAE federation.

The supervising engineer said a leakage was reported and he ordered some workers to go down and check. “Within minutes the whole thing went down,” he was quoted by the Gulf News as saying.

Three bodies were found by Tuesday morning, the paper said, adding that the hardened concrete made the rescue operations very difficult. It said all six workers involved in the accident were Indian.

Pictures printed in the press showed that most of the ceiling had caved in, while mound of concretes were piled up in the basement under protruding iron rods.

Ajman’s civil defence chief Saleh al-Matroushi told Al-Emarat Al-Yom that there was little hope any of the missing workers could survive.

Work accidents are frequent on building sites in the UAE, mainly in the emirate of Dubai which is going through a construction frenzy.

In November, seven construction workers were killed when part of a bridge being built collapsed. Two labourers were killed and 57 others injured in January last year when a fire broke out in a tower being built in Dubai.

Similar accidents have prompted the police to impose strict safety regulations on construction sites.

The working conditions of hundreds of thousands of mostly Asian expatriate labourers in the oil-rich UAE have often been criticised by international human rights groups and prompted several protests by the workers themselves.—AFP