Qatar mall fire claims 19 lives

QATAR: A fire that erupted at a nursery in a huge Venice-themed shopping centre in the expat-dominated Qatari capital of Doha on Monday killed 19 people including 13 children, the interior ministry said.

Four of the children who died were Spanish, said a foreign ministry spokeswoman in Madrid, while Paris announced that a three-year-old French child also perished.

It was also feared that two-year old triplets from an expatriate New Zealand family perished in the blaze that ripped through the shopping centre.

The fire left “19 dead, including 13 children, among them seven girls and six boys, in addition to four female teachers,” the interior ministry said on its Twitter page, citing Qatar's health minister.

Two members of the civil defence also died in the fire at the capital's Villaggio mall, it said.

The fire broke out at a nursery, state minister for the interior Abdullah bin Nasser Al-Thani told reporters.

“The first report of fire at Villaggio was received by the operations centre at 11:02 am (0802 GMT),” he said, according to the QNA state news agency, pointing out that police and civil defence reached the site within minutes.

He said it became clear that “20 children were at the nursery in the complex and all efforts were concentrated on evacuating those kids,” adding that firefighters had to break through the roof to get to trapped children after a staircase to the first-floor nursery collapsed.

Dense smoke inside the mall combined with the fierce temperature from the flames made reaching the trapped children very difficult, a civil defence representative told a news conference.

AFP