Police in the city of Shenzhen in South China's Guangdong Province said on Monday that a man who fell to his death from a building on Sunday night has been identified as a former official with the city's Guangming New District, where 75 people remain missing following a human-induced landslide over a week ago.

The man, surnamed Xu, was the former head of the district's urban management bureau. According to local police, the investigation into Xu's death has excluded the possibility of homicide, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

It is not immediately clear whether Xu had been put under investigation after the landslide, which struck when a huge pile of construction waste collapsed in the Hengtaiyu industrial zone on December 20, destroying 33 buildings.

Meanwhile, Shenzhen police on Monday were taking "coercive measures" against 12 people being treated as persons of interest in the landslide, including some in charge of Shenzhen Yixiang-

long Investment Development - the company operating the quarry that was used as a waste storage site - according to a statement released by the local police bureau on its official Sina Weibo account on Monday.

The police pledged to cooperate with the State Council's investigation of the disaster and vowed to punish those responsible in accordance with the law, read the statement.

The landslide was defined as a work safety incident by the State Council's investigation team on December 25. The team's report indicated that the tragedy was not the result of any natural geological phenomenon.

Speaking at a meeting following a mourning ritual on Saturday, Yang Huanning, chief of the State Administration of Work Safety, pledged to thoroughly investigate the landslide and severely punish those responsible, Xinhua reported.