LONDON—How many people died in the Grenfell Tower blaze?

More than three weeks after London’s deadliest fire since the Second World War, survivors and their advocates are convinced that the authorities have yet to publicly acknowledge the true death toll.

Officially, the police say that at least 80 people either died or are missing and presumed dead. On Monday, after weeks of criticism, the police for the first time offered an estimate of the number of people who should have been in the building that night — 350 — and said that of that figure, 255 had survived and 14 were not at home, which would imply that 81 people had died.

But the death toll has been challenged by skeptics, including three volunteer researchers who have been trying to fill the information vacuum: an Iranian biomedical engineering student who lived on the third floor (he estimated at least 123 dead), a demographer who came out of retirement to bring professional techniques to bear and a software engineer in Brussels whose website has emerged as the most credible source (both the demographer and the engineer place the toll in the 90s).

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The tragedy has come to symbolize not only official negligence, but also rising inequality, particularly given that the fire occurred in a London borough, Kensington and Chelsea Council, which is one of the wealthiest local governments in Britain.

The Metropolitan Police, which serves Greater London, says that it had made efforts to provide information, but that it is painstaking work, hindered in some cases by inaccurate and unreliable official records. But the paucity of official information about the fire dominated a series of meetings last week between residents and the authorities.

“If this was a terrorist attack, they would have had the numbers out here already,” said Beinazir Lasharie, a Labour member of the Kensington and Chelsea Council who represents the neighbourhood that includes the tower. “They need to tell us the truth, because the people are angry and they’re getting angrier.”

From the day of the fire, June 14, when the death toll was initially announced as only six and later 12, people began to complain that the police were giving low estimates. It was clear that flames had engulfed the entire building in a very short time, forcing some — no one has divulged how many — to jump out of higher floors and others to flee down the single, smoke-choked staircase.

The death toll was raised to 17 on June 15, to 30 on June 16, to 58 on June 17, to 79 on June 19, finally reaching 80 on June 28, where it has stayed since. On July 5, the police added that they had recovered 87 sets of human remains, but could not say for sure how many people that represented.

“We are many months from being able to provide a number that we believe accurately represents the total loss of life inside Grenfell Tower,” Detective Chief Superintendent Fiona McCormack said on June 28. “Only after we have completed the search and recovery operation — which will take until the end of the year — and then months afterwards, when experts have carried out the identification process, will we be in a position to tell you who has died.”

She added, “I do not want there to be any hidden victims of this tragedy.”

Many in the neighbourhood are unconvinced.

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Ahmed Palekar, who has lived near Grenfell for many years and said he knew countless people who have not showed up since the fire, was one of many locals who said he thought several hundred had died. “They’re afraid of what will happen if that comes out.”

Abdurahman Sayed, who runs the community centre that includes the mosque where most of the residents prayed, predicted that hundreds had died in the fire. “I don’t know what purpose it serves to hide the number, but this is the most surveilled society anywhere,” he said. “There are CCTV cameras everywhere. Surely they knew who was in that building.”

The London police said they had not heard from anyone who lived in or was inside 23 apartments — nearly a fifth of the total, all on the upper floors where the fire became much more intense.

Based on the latest census, from 2011, the tower had an average occupancy of 2.35 people per household. The tower had 129 apartments, and it is not known how many were vacant.

But many experts think the census undercounted people in poor immigrant neighbourhoods like this one, as people were reluctant or frightened to reveal how many people lived in their apartments. Many of the families were religious Muslims, who community leaders say tend to have large families; but there were also some apartments with only single, elderly residents. (The 350 estimate provided on Monday implied 2.7 people per household; the police said that figure was based on government records and other sources, including school registers, but did not provide a detailed methodology.)

The fire broke out around 1 a.m., when most people were at home, and during Ramadan, when many people were visiting from abroad.

Moreover, there are many accounts of people fleeing upstairs in an attempt to escape the fire, and congregating in upper floor apartments.

“I personally knew a lot of people who did not come out of that tower,” said Lasharie, who was elected to the council in 2014. Based on political canvassing, she said she believed the residents numbered “400 to 500 minimum,” compared with the 2011 census figure of 259 people in the building and the police estimate of 350.

The Grenfell Fire Response Team said through a spokeswoman that 117 families of survivors from the tower were receiving assistance, but it declined to say how many people that represented.

The volunteer researchers have used different methods to arrive at their own estimates.

The software engineer, Joshua Vantard, has been using crowdsourcing techniques on a website, Gathrer, to amass information on those who had been found or were missing. With two volunteer editors, he began poring through public sources to compile the information. He says the data remains too incomplete to allow scientific judgments, but his figure of 93 remains the most complete accounting in the public domain. (Vantard took data identifying the victims by name offline on Monday, citing privacy concerns raised by people claiming to represent the survivors.)

Sajad Jamalvatan, the Iranian student, who was out the night of the fire and whose mother survived the blaze, said he had his own count of 123 dead, but did not supply the raw data to back up his assertion. “It cannot be 80, it’s double that,” he said of the police estimate. “They don’t want to give out three-digit numbers.”