More than 35 people were killed and dozens injured in a building fire in an area heavily populated with foreign workers in Kuwait, the interior ministry said on Wednesday.
Forty-three people were injured, the health ministry said, after the blaze broke out in a residential building south of Kuwait City at dawn.
“Unfortunately, we received a report of a fire at… exactly 6:00 am (0300 GMT) in the Mangaf area,” Major General Eid Al-Owaihan, director of the interior ministry’s General Department of Criminal Evidence, said during a visit to the site.
“As for the deaths in the building behind me, the number has exceeded 35 so far.”
Forensic teams have identified three of the bodies, Owaihan added.
According to a source in the General Fire Department, the victims suffocated from rising smoke after the fire broke out on the ground floor.
The building’s owner has been detained in an investigation into potential negligence, the Interior Minister Sheikh Fahd Al-Yousef said as he too visited the scene.
Any properties found to have violated safety regulations will be evacuated immediately, he warned.
“We will work to address the issue of labour overcrowding and neglect,” the minister said. “We will detain the owner of the property where the fire broke out until legal procedures are completed.”
The blaze is one of the worst seen in Kuwait, which borders Iraq and Saudi Arabia and sits on about seven percent of the world’s oil reserves.
In 2009, 57 people died when a Kuwaiti woman, apparently seeking revenge, set fire to a tent at a wedding party when her husband married a second wife.
Nusra al-Enezi threw petrol on the tent and set it alight as people celebrated inside. She was hanged in 2017 for the crime, whose victims included many women and children.
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