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Meanwhile, the building’s sudden collapse has exposed a number of structural irregularities — including cans of cooking oil embedded inside wall cavities — and has left officials, neighbors and residents wondering: Why was this building the site of so many deaths?

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On Tuesday, Taiwan issued an arrest warrant for the building’s developer, Lin Ming-hui, along with two others, Reuters reported.

The previous day, Tainan Mayor William Lai said that survivors have reported “legal violations” in the building, according to the BBC. Tainan’s government said the building wasn’t listed as dangerous before the quake, though prosecutors are now investigating the complex’s construction to see whether the builder cut corners.

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But plenty of people in Tainan say they had misgivings about the building long before it fell. A man whose grandchildren were still buried inside the complex Sunday told the Associated Press that he had warned his son not to purchase an apartment there.

“It was suspiciously cheap,” said the man, identified only by his surname, Huang. A man standing next to him nodded his head in agreement. He, too, was waiting on news of relatives trapped inside.

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Huang’s son escaped the collapse, but his daughter-in-law was in the hospital in serious condition, according to the AP. His 11- and 12-year-old grandsons, who had been sleeping on the ninth floor, have not been found.

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Yueh Chin-sen, whose mother-in-law’s family of eight was trapped inside the building Monday, said that he knew residents had complained in the past about problems with their home.

“There were cracks in the walls and tiles fell off after several quakes in recent years,” he told Agence France-Presse.

Others brought up how the basements always seemed to leak when it rained, or how the elevators were rarely working, or how the pipes were often blocked.

“We always wanted to move, but we couldn’t afford it,” Chun-jung told Reuters.

On Sunday, Taiwan’s state-run news agency, CNA, reported that several cooking oil cans were found in pillars of the destroyed building. Tai Yun-fa, a structural engineer, told CNA that in the 1990s it was legal to use oil cans as “filler” in pillars that served aesthetic rather than weight-bearing purposes. In some cases, this may actually be safer than filling the pillars with concrete: It prevents the building from being too heavy. But the practice was banned after cans were found in the walls of buildings that collapsed during a 1999 earthquake that killed more than 2,300 people.

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Still, though no longer legal — foam is now used instead — the cans wouldn’t have been what made the building hazardous, Tai said.

But the cans may not have been the building’s only problem. Taiwanese media has reported that polystyrene — the plastic used for “packing peanuts” — has been found mixed in with the concrete of supporting beams, Reuters reported. And Lee Kunhuan, an architect and a former mayor of the area, told the New York Times that although the complex complied with building codes during construction in the early 1990s, that was only because developers exploited loopholes that have since been closed — much like the metal can law. Today, he said, the building would not have been allowed to reach higher than four stories, and it would have been better designed to accommodate the stress of an earthquake.

Taiwan, located in the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire,” is used to seismic activity, though temblors aren’t often as destructive as this most recent one.

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Neighbors who watched the building go up — in fits and starts over the course of three years as the construction companies involved ran out of money — said they doubted the workmanship.

“When it was being built, I looked at it and thought, only people from out of town would buy it. We local people would never dare to,” Yang Shu-mei, who lived next to the building, told Reuters.

And once the condos went on the market, Reuters reported, a local bank would not issue mortgages to those who bought them. Tainan resident Kuo Yi-chien told the news service the bank did not want to grant loans to people living in what they felt was a shoddily made building.

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Kuo’s daughter, who bought an apartment in the complex after securing a loan from a different bank, is now in an intensive care unit with a cracked skull. Her husband is at another hospital ICU with damaged lungs.

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Their 7-year-old daughter died in the collapse.

“People from outside of the town, people like them, had no idea what was going on before they moved in,” Kuo explained to Reuters as she waited outside her daughter’s hospital room. Kuo said she hadn’t heard about the problems with the building, or the bank’s qualms with it, until after her family moved in.

“They did not know the building was completed by the second developer after the first one went bust. They only found out after they signed the contract,” she said.

Four days after the quake, the developer, Lin Ming-hui, was nowhere to be found.

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Meanwhile, the site of the Weiguan Jinlong complex was teeming with orange-clad rescue workers and anxious onlookers waiting for some news of those buried inside. The building itself was now a mess of broken concrete and twisted steel, long support beams extending uselessly from the wreckage of what once were walls.

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But progress in rescuing those still trapped in the rubble of their former home has slowed as time ticks on. About 310 people had been pulled out of the collapsed building between Saturday and Sunday, officials told the BBC. On Monday, just four more people were found alive.

One was a woman who was found lying underneath her husband’s body — he had protected her from the brunt of the collapse. Their infant son, who also died, was nearby, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC).

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Another was an eight-year-old girl named Lin Su-Chin, who was conscious and talking to rescuers as they extracted her from the rubble, weary and thirsty but miraculously unharmed.

“She is awake, but looks dehydrated, lost some temperature but she’s awake and her blood pressure is OK,” Lai, the mayor, told the Associated Press. “I asked her if there’s anything wrong with her body. She shook her head.”

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The girl’s aunt was found shortly afterward, according to the ABC.

That leaves more than 100 people lost inside the collapsed building, with diminishing hopes that they’ll be carried out alive. Tensions were high at an information center for families of those still missing, the Associated Press reported. When an official told a pair of grandparents they had no news about the couple’s daughter-in-law and her two young sons, the grandfather, Liu Meng-hsun, cried out in anger.

“Does that mean we are here to wait for bodies?” he demanded.