The death toll from the London tower inferno was last night expected to pass 50 as it emerged that the United States had banned the type of cladding that allegedly encased the 24-storey block.
Scotland Yard said that it had begun a criminal inquiry amid calls from MPs for corporate manslaughter charges to be brought. Seventeen people were confirmed to have died in the blaze that swept through the building in the early hours of Wednesday.
Senior sources voiced fears yesterday that up to 100 people could have died in the fire but later revised their estimates. Grenfell Tower, in west London, was home to about 600 residents.
The difficulty of matching reports of those missing with the complex process of identifying the dead has
