London fire: Death toll rises to 17 but 'no more survivors'

At least 17 people died in a massive fire that engulfed a west London block of flats, police said, as they warned that figure could rise further.



Earlier, the fire service said rescuers did not expect to find any more survivors in the smouldering ruins of Grenfell Tower, in north Kensington.
Sniffer dogs are to be sent in to search for evidence and identification of people still inside.
The Queen has said her "thoughts and prayers" are with families.
People have been desperately seeking news of missing family and friends.
More than 30 people remain in hospital - 17 of whom are in a critical condition.

The prime minister spoke to fire commissioner Dany Cotton as she surveyed the damage

Labour's Jeremy Corbyn spoke to firefighters and community leaders on a visit

Prime Minister Theresa May, who made a brief private visit to the scene, has promised a full investigation, as questions are asked about the speed at which the fire spread.
Later, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn told community leaders "the truth has to come out" on a separate visit to the site.
Firefighters were called to the 24-storey residential tower in the early hours of Wednesday, at a time when hundreds of people were inside, most of them sleeping.
Many were woken by neighbors, or shouts from below, and fled the building. Fire crews rescued 65 adults and children, but some stayed in their homes, trapped by smoke and flames
.On Thursday morning, London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton said her crews had identified a "number of people, but we know there will be more".
The size of the building means it could take weeks, she added.
Asked how many were still missing, Met Police Commander Stuart Cundy said it would be "wrong and incredibly distressing" to give a number.
"I know one person was reported 46 times to the casualty bureau," he said.
A brief search of all floors in the tower had been carried out, but the severity of the fire and amount of debris meant a thorough search would be "difficult and painstaking", Commander Cotton said.

Fire seemed to spread quickly across the tower block's cladding


Community centers were inundated with donations from across London and the UK

Temporary structures will be built inside the block in order to shore it up before more thorough work can begin.
The cause of the fire, which took more than 24 hours to bring under control, remains unknown.
Throughout the morning, only smoke was seen coming from the charred building, but by Thursday lunchtime flames flared up again on one of the lower floors.
Dozens of people left homeless spent the night in makeshift rescue centers, as well-wishers signed a wall of condolence near the site.
London-born singer Adele and her husband visited the scene on Wednesday evening, and was seen comforting people. Singer Rita Ora also pitched in, helping to sort donations outside the tower.
Photographs and messages in English and Arabic have been left for loved ones.
Alongside them are words of anger and calls for justice, with people saying their safety concerns were not listened to.
The local authority - Kensington and Chelsea council - said 44 households had been placed in emergency accommodation so far.
Through the night, people donated food, clothes and blankets for those left without homes.
By early morning some volunteers said they were overwhelmed with donations and were turning people and vans away.
One volunteer, Bhupinder Singh, said: "It is times like this that the best of our community comes out. This is where you find out how good it is to be a Londoner."


Questions have been raised about why the fire appeared to spread so quickly and engulf the entire building.
BBC Newsnight's Chris Cook says the type of cladding on the outside of Grenfell Tower, installed in 2015 during a refurbishment, had a polyethylene - or plastic - core, instead of a more fireproof alternative with a mineral core.
Similar cladding was used in high-rise buildings hit by fires in France, the UAE and Australia, he said.
The government has said checks were now planned on tower blocks that have gone through a similar upgrade.
Construction firm Rydon, which carried out the refurbishment, initially said in a statement that the work met "all fire regulations" - the wording was omitted in a later statement.
Fire risk assessment in tower blocks was "less rigorous" since responsibility for it shifted from the fire brigade to the owner, Sian Berry, housing committee chairwoman of the London Assembly, said.


Concerns have also been raised about fire alarms not going off and the lack of sprinklers.
It is still possible to build tall buildings without sprinklers, said Russ Timpson of the Tall Buildings Fire Safety Network, but he expected regulations might change soon.
Overseas colleagues are "staggered" when they hear tall buildings are built in the UK with a single staircase, he added.
Roy Wilsher, chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council, said that if the fire spread up the outside of the tower, sprinklers might not have made a difference.
Design and regulations for such tower blocks mean fire should be contained in a single flat, he said. "Clearly something's gone wrong in this case."

Jessica Urbano Ramirez, 12, is believed to have become separated from her family

Meanwhile, appeals are being made on social media for news of friends and family who are still unaccounted for.
Among them are 12-year-old Jessica Urbano Ramirez and 66-year-old grandfather Tony Disson, from the 22nd floor.
Security guard Mo Tuccu, who was visiting friends in the tower to break the Ramadan fast, is also missing.
One family from the 17th floor has five people missing. Husna Begum and four other family members were last heard from two hours after the fire started.
Labour MP David Lammy is appealing for information about his friend, Khadija Saye, and her mother, Mary Mendy.
An emergency number - 0800 0961 233 - has been set up for anyone concerned about friends or family.
Stories continue to emerge from survivors and eyewitnesses.
One man, who lives in the neighborhood, said he saw people banging at the window and children screaming. He said he knew one family with five children under the age of 10 who were all missing.
"There are so many children that are unaccounted for. My daughter's best friend has gone," he told BBC's Victoria Derbyshire.
Michael Paramasivan, who lived on the seventh floor with his girlfriend and young daughter, was among many who defied official advice to stay put, and ran with their families down dark, smoke-filled corridors to get out of the building.
"If we had stayed in that flat, we would've perished," he said.
People in the street below described watching as a baby was thrown from a window, people jumped and climbed down the side of the burning tower using ropes made from bed sheets.
Jody Martin said: "I was yelling at everyone to get down and they were saying 'We can't leave our apartments, the smoke is too bad on the corridors'."

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Lesotho Prime Minister Thomas Thabane's wife shot dead

The estranged wife of incoming Lesotho Prime Minister Thomas Thabane has been shot dead two days before his inauguration.


Lipolelo Thabane, 58, was traveling home with a friend when both women were shot by an unknown assailant, the police say.
The police add the motive is unknown and an investigation is continuing.
The couple had been living separately since 2012 and filed for divorce which hasn't been granted yet.
BBC southern Africa correspondent Karen Allen reports that neighbors claim there had been an incident earlier in the week when a group of unidentified men were spotted hammering on the First Lady's door.She won a high court battle against her husband to secure the privileges of a First Lady, instead of Mr Thabane's youngest wife, Liabiloe, reports the AFP news agency.
Mr Thabane is now living with a third wife.
Samonyane Ntsekele, the secretary general of Mr Thabane's All Basotho Convention party, told AFP that the prime minister was devastated by the shooting.

"Everyone is traumatized by these developments," he said.
The election took place earlier this month and was the third election in three years.
There is a bitter power-struggle in the country and Mr Thabane still has enemies in the military, our correspondent adds.
His inauguration is still expected to take place on Friday.

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Fin - the secret Facebook group of Nigerian women

It is one of Facebook's fastest growing communities and has become such a phenomenon that last week, Mark Zuckerberg asked to meet its founder. But what is Fin?

Female IN or Fin is a "secret" Facebook group that has recently clocked up over a million members, largely from Nigeria.
But it's a secret that founder Lola Omolola wants you to know all about - if you're a woman that is.
Though it has a vaguely romantic air, secret is just Facebook terminology, Ms Omolola says. It means invitation-only - you need to know a member to get in.
"It's a safe place, for a woman who has something to say," Ms Omolola explains
"You don't have to agree but it is her story, she can say it."
The group is a sort of confessional space, where women share stories that they might be uncomfortable - or even afraid - to tell in person.
It doesn't offer anonymity - members have to post under their real names.
And the stories are stunning, although they remain strictly confidential.
In the few days that I've been a Finster, I've read testimonies on domestic abuse, physical and emotional violence, child abuse and rape.
One woman speaks about the moment she told her parents she was about to have a child as a single girl of 17, another about finally being accepted as a lesbian by her mother after many years.
They are brave and intimate, telling of failed relationships or unconventional sexual preferences.
The posts are brutally honest but many of them are laced with self-deprecating humor.
Like the woman who mortified herself on a first date in front of a banquet hall of people or the lady who stole the keys of a bus driver after he bumped her car and refused to apologize.
Many of the stories speak of a distinctly Nigerian experience.


Until recently the group was called Female In Nigeria, so it's not a surprise that most of its members are just that.
"The Nigerian woman has been the core of this process, because I am a Nigerian woman," says Ms Omolola.
A former journalist, she moved from Nigeria to the US in the early 2000s at the age of 24 and started the group in 2015.
She had had an idea to start something for some time - a forum where Nigerian women could talk openly about the issues that affected them. But it was the kidnap of the Chibok girls that drove her to do it.
"I knew the cause of it," she says.
"When you grow up in a place where a woman's voice is not even valid, everything reinforces that idea that we're not good enough."
It didn't surprise her that a group of men could kidnap and enslave these girls, because they didn't see them as equals.
"Between the ages of three and six I noticed that whenever a girl shows any sign of self-awareness she gets silenced. When I said anything I got a pinch - a real, live pinch."
Those pinches came from aunties, uncles, even her mother but never from her father. And it's him that Ms Omolola traces her early feminism to.
Her father was a part-time businessman and was often at home with the children while her mum worked as full-time hematologist.
"We never felt any gender disparity," she says.
"I realize now how much effort it must have taken. It was not something he was just stumbling into. It was an active choice."


Fin started out as a group where women could discuss women's issues - one of the first blogs was on domestic violence - and Ms Omolola expected it to be an abstract conversation.
But women responded with their own stories.
Almost instantly it became a place where people could share things they had never shared before.
"When we started I used to cry. I stopped sleeping, I stopped eating," she says. "I was not ready for the stories that were coming out."
"There were women who had been abused for 40 years and hadn't told anyone. No-one should live like that."
Now the group gets hundreds of applications for posts every day but they are managed and approved by a group of 28 volunteers. About 40-100 make it on the page.Fin has strict rules. Above anything else, Finsters are not allowed to judge each other. Any negative comments are removed, as is the member who posts them"I noticed that those people who try to shut women up in real life, they came there," says Ms Omolola.
"They are so deeply conditioned to work against their own interest.
"It's the online version of the pinch and the shush."
But the pinchers and shushers were persistent.
In a religiously conservative society like Nigeria, expressions of female sexual freedom were never going to go unchallenged.
Some members tried to get around the ban by commenting with passages from the bible which condemned the woman's actions.
That inspired a second rule - no preaching.
"We prohibit religious-themed advice," it says in the rules. "Fin is not a place of worship."


People have likened Fin and its founder to the devil, they've called the group evil, a corrupter of young women.
Ms Omolola says she has been the subject of concerted attacks by church groups. But she's not worried.
"Most people think that the controversy would kill me," she says. "They don't realize that it's actually empowering me."
After amassing a million-strong membership and a high-profile meeting with Mr Zuckerberg, what is next for Fin?
Ms Omolola has dreams of expanding the group into bricks and mortar, providing centers where women can go to talk about their experiences in a safe space.
But that may be a long way off.
"It needs money and right now I have none," she says. "I can't even pay my rent."
It's something that she discussed with Zuckerberg and though Facebook haven't offered funding yet, she's still in conversation with it on how to move the group forward.
From day one, she says, she had offers from companies who want to advertise on Fin but she has refused to monetize women's stories.
On Mr Zuckerberg's prompt she is now focusing on promoting the message of the site - female empowerment and tolerance.
And she's doing interviews for the first time.

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