(Kuwait) At least 49 people died Wednesday in a fire in a building used to house nearly 200 foreign workers in Kuwait, according to a new increased toll announced by the Interior Ministry.
The fire, in the suburb of Mangaf, located south of the Kuwaiti capital, also left around forty injured, the Ministry of Health said in a press release.
A previous report from the Ministry of the Interior reported more than 35 deaths. A hospital official, for his part, identified 30 injured.
The fire broke out on the lower floors of a building inhabited by Asian workers, witnesses said, and quickly spread to the upper floors.
The six-story building was used to house 196 workers, said an official of the company that employs them, during the visit of the Minister of the Interior, Sheikh Fahd al-Youssef, who went to the bedside of the victims.
Only three of those killed have been identified, said General Eid al-Owaihan, director of forensic science at the Interior Ministry.
“We received the first report of the fire at 6 a.m. (11 p.m. Eastern Time). Many wounded were taken to hospitals and more than 35 people died in the building behind me,” General Owaihan told state television, before the death toll was updated upwards.
The victims died of asphyxiation after inhaling the smoke released by the fire, the reasons for which have not yet been determined, according to Kuwaiti civil protection.
The owner of the building was arrested as part of an investigation into possible negligence, the Minister of the Interior said during his visit to the site.
The minister told journalists that he intended to ask the capital’s municipality to evacuate all buildings in this suburb that do not comply with security regulations.
“We are going to tackle the problem of areas overpopulated by foreign workers and the resulting negligence,” assured the Minister of the Interior to the press.
The nationalities of the victims were not communicated, but the Indian ambassador in Kuwait City, contacted by AFP, indicated that he was in one of the hospitals where the injured were transported.
Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar said he was “deeply shocked by the news” on X and offered “his deepest condolences to the families of those who tragically lost their lives.”
The majority of Kuwait’s population of 4.3 million is made up of foreign nationals, including mainly workers of Asian origin.
The oil-rich monarchy in the northern Gulf has been the scene of repeated political crises due to disputes between the parliament, elected by universal suffrage, and the princely Al-Sabah family, which holds the main levers of power.
Kuwait experienced a similar tragedy in 2009 when a Kuwaiti woman doused gasoline and set fire to a tent sheltering women and children during the wedding of her husband who then took a second wife. The number of dead had exceeded fifty.
Nusra al-Enezi, who descended from one of the country’s largest tribes, was hanged in 2017 for this crime which shocked Kuwaiti society at the time.
