The ministry sent a labor inspection team from its occupational health and safety (OHS) division to investigate the incident, said Yuli Adiratna, the ministry’s director for labor norms inspection, on Monday.

The OHS team, he added, would help investigate the cause of the sudden blast, which ripped open part of the ceiling on the first floor of the mall and is thought to have caused a freight elevator to fall.

The team will also check the mall’s infrastructure and related documentation while the Depok Police investigate a recent discovery that a gas leak from a distribution line supplying one of the mall’s tenants may have caused the explosion.

“[The gas leak] was close to [...] the electrical circuit box, so it may have caused a spark or explosion,” Yuli told The Jakarta Post, noting that investigations were still ongoing.

“But for sure, the team is with the police in the field to determine the main cause of the incident.”

As of Sunday night, the police had questioned 12 witnesses, including mall visitors, employees and the management.

Margo City marketing communications manager Reza Ardiananda told the Post that the management routinely looked after the building’s facilities and had improved on public hygiene measures throughout the pandemic.

He said the management would bear responsibility for the harm caused to the victims but did not elaborate.

The incident killed one person, a coffee shop employee who succumbed to head injuries during treatment at the nearby University of Indonesia hospital. The victim, 29-year-old Novandri, was hit by debris as he was packing up supplies with his manager at the time of the incident.

The ten people injured consisted of two security guards, one visitor and seven employees of mall tenants. Seven have been sent home, while four others are being treated for severe burns at the Bunda General Hospital.

Read also: Jakarta building collapse allegedly caused by dilapidated structure, 11 injured

In addition to the Manpower Ministry, the Social Affairs Ministry has disbursed staple food assistance worth Rp 600,000 and death compensation of Rp 15 million to the grieving family. The other ten victims have also received staple food assistance.

"Following an instruction from the minister to provide aid to the victims, we provided assistance in the form of staple foods worth Rp 600,000 to the family at the funeral home," wrote Suweno Syahrul of the Balai Inten quick response team in a statement on Monday.

Authorities will continue the investigation to determine responsibility for the incident. Yuli said the OHS team guaranteed that the people affected would be compensated.

“The point is, we’ll ensure that the workers affected by the accident get their rights,” he said.

Saturday’s incident has brought the issue of building safety back into public discourse, after similar incidents occurred in and around Greater Jakarta.

In January of last year, a dilapidated five-story building in West Jakarta partially collapsed, injuring about a dozen people and triggering a probe by the Jakarta Spatial Planning Agency.

A few months prior, the walls and ceiling of the Bogor City Council building collapsed in a heavy rainstorm. The building had opened in April 2019.

In December 2009, the partial collapse of the Metro Tanah Abang market claimed four lives and injured 14 people.

Building safety is a fraught issue in Indonesia, as construction standards are not always observed and the country sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, which makes it prone to earthquakes and other natural disasters.