Fire in Iraqi mall kills at least 61 people, officials say

BAGHDAD - At least 61 people died in a fire that ravaged a newly opened mall in eastern Iraq’s Wasit province, officials said Thursday.

The fire broke out Wednesday night at the Corniche Hypermarket in the city of Kut, officials said. According to a statement from Iraq’s Interior Ministry, most of the victims suffocated to death in the building’s bathrooms, and at least 14 victims’ bodies were charred and could not be immediately identified.

Emergency responders were able to rescue more than 45 people who were trapped inside the building, the ministry said. Videos from the scene shared by local outlets showed people being brought down from upper floors of the building on cranes.

The tragedy has shaken “the conscience and emotions of the nation,” the ministry said.

Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani visited the site Thursday. A statement published by his office said he blamed the fire on the “negligence” and “leniency” of building owners and constructors who disregard health and safety standards, comparing it to other recent fires in the country. He said the tragedy amounted to a “form of manslaughter and corruption,” the statement said.

The five-story building, which had opened just seven days earlier, housed a restaurant and a mall, the Interior Ministry said.

The state-run Iraqi News Agency reported that the governor of Wasit province, Mohammed al-Mayyeh, announced a three-day period of mourning beginning Thursday and said that he “filed legal cases against the building owner, the mall owner, and anyone connected to the incident.” The nature of the charges was not immediately clear Thursday and the governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.

The Interior Ministry said it formed an investigative committee to determine the cause of the fire and said that it would “not hesitate to hold any party accountable if found negligent or responsible.”

A security official from Iraq’s Civil Defense, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, told The Post that the source of the fire was an air conditioning unit, which sparked a fire inside a perfume shop that quickly spread throughout the building.

The official said the high death toll was due to the use of highly flammable building materials and a lack of emergency exits - in violation of local health and safety regulations.

A provincial official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, told The Post that the building originally housed a restaurant that was shut down due to noncompliance with safety regulations. The official said it was not clear how the building’s owners obtained permission to convert it into a multistory mall with a restaurant on the top floor, and said the building did not have emergency exits or fire alarms and was clad in highly flammable plastic material.

Mohammed Ali, a civil engineer from Wasit province, said the fire “has exposed a deep flaw in the safety and oversight system for investment projects” in Iraq. He said that the mall did not have evacuation staircases or a modern fire alarm system and asked how the project could have been given a permit.

Fires and explosions tied to poor building standards are common in Iraq, where the construction industry is frequently marred with accusations of corruption.

In April 2021, a fire at Ibn al-Khatib Hospital in Baghdad killed more than 80 people, many of them patients in a coronavirus isolation ward, when oxygen tanks exploded. Iraq’s civil defense told several news outlets at the time that the flames spread more quickly because the hospital had false ceilings and no smoke detectors or fire hoses. In July 2021, another fire killed more than 90 people at the al-Hussein Teaching Hospital in Nasiriya, in southern Iraq. Local health officials also blamed shoddy construction, while then-President Barham Salih said that both tragedies were “the result of entrenched corruption and poor management.”

Timsit reported from Paris.