By Jack Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korean police said on Friday a fire at a lithium battery maker that killed 23 people in June occurred as the company raced to produce batteries to meet a deadline without taking action to address signs of dangerous quality failures.
Nine other workers were injured in the fire at battery maker Aricell, majority owned by S-Connect. Calls to Aricell seeking comment following the police announcement were not immediately answered, but the company has previously said it complied with all required safety precautions and training.
Police have been investigating the blaze, one of South Korea's deadliest industrial accidents in recent years, over suspected safety violations after ordering a halt of operations.
The Labour Ministry and police had sought arrest warrants for several executives including the CEO for alleged safety violations and negligence, officials said at a news conference.
The company had failed a quality inspection in April for batteries that were intended to be supplied to the country's military and subsequently ramped up production to make up the backlog to meet a deadline, police official Kim Jong-min said.
It hired temporary and unskilled workers, contributing to a jump in product defect rates, including overheating of finished batteries, but did not take action to contain safety risks, Kim said.
"The accident occurred as the company pushed ahead without taking measures despite problems in various steps in the production process," he said.
The high number of casualties was due to a lack of emergency escape training, Kim said. The workers who were killed had missed a 37-second window to flee, he said.
Security camera footage showed the fire sparking from a stack of batteries and quickly engulfing the factory where 35,000 lithium batteries were stored.
The toxic smoke probably rendered workers unconscious within seconds, fire officials have previously said.
Seventeen of those who died were Chinese, and one was Laotian. The rest were South Koreans.
Soon after the fire, Aricell CEO Park Soon-kwan apologised to everyone affected by the accident.
Park said at that time it had followed all required safety precautions and training, but pledged to take part in the probe and ensure there would be no repeat of such an accident.
At Friday's news conference, authorities said they had requested an arrest warrant for Park on allegations that included violating industrial safety laws.
Set up in 2020, Aricell has 48 full-time employees and makes lithium primary batteries for sensors and radio communication devices.
The company had supplied batteries to the military for use in some communication and cryptography devices, a spokesperson for South Korea's defence procurement agency has said.
(Reporting by Jack Kim and Heekyong Yang Editing by Ed Davies and Sam Holmes)
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