Officials concluded 'there were no safety concerns' about crack in Florida bridge hours before collapse

Three hours before six people were killed when a pedestrian bridge collapsed in Miami, it has emerged that engineers and state and officials from Florida International University (FIU) concluded a crack in the structure was not a safety concern.

The admission by the university sparked fury among relatives of some of the victims who were crushed to death when it fell onto their cars,

The meeting involved FIGG, the private contractor for the overall bridge design, the school, Florida Department of Transportation officials and Munilla Construction Management (MCM), which installed the $14.2m (£10.1m) bridge, the institution said.

A FIGG engineer "concluded there were no safety concerns and the crack did not compromise the structural integrity of the bridge," FIU said in a statement.

Three hours later, the bridge collapsed, it added.

Joe Smitha, whose 18-year-old niece Alexa Duran was killed by the falling structure, raged against what he called "complete incompetence" and a "colossal failure".

"Why they had to build this monstrosity in the first place to get children across the street?" he said. "Then they decided to stress test this bridge while traffic was running underneath it?"

Rolando Fraga Hernandez and his gold Jeep Cherokee were pulled from the wreckage on Saturday. Later, the bodies of Oswald Gonzalez, 57, and Alberto Arias, 54, were found inside a white Chevy truck.

Navarro Brown was also pulled from the rubble and later died at the hospital.

News of the meeting between engineers and officials followed a revelation that the engineer overseeing the bridge, which linked the FIU campus with the city of Sweetwater, had called a state official two days before the collapse to report cracks.

However, the voicemail message from FIGG's lead engineer Denney Pate, including his assertion that the cracking posed no safety issue, was not retrieved until a day after the tragedy, according to the state transportation agency.

Mr Pate did not immediately respond to email queries.

In the message, he said his team had observed "some cracking" at one end of the bridge and that repairs were warranted, "but from a safety perspective we don't see that there's any issue there, so we're not concerned about it from that perspective."

He added: "Obviously the cracking is not good and something's going to have to be, ya know, done to repair that."

Agencies contributed to this report