Blaze engulfs hotel in Iraq’s Kurdish north, killing 29 including foreigners, say police
By APFriday, July 16, 2010
Hotel fire kills 29, including foreigners, in Iraq
BAGHDAD — A fire in a five-story hotel in northern Iraq killed 29 people, including foreigners, in a harrowing blaze that saw victims jumping to their deaths to escape the flames, officials and witnesses said Friday.
The fire in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah began late Thursday night in the Soma Hotel and was sparked by an electrical short, said chief of police Brig. Gen. Najim-al-Din Qadir. Four women and four children were among the dead, he added.
Witnesses described a terrifying scene of panicked guests hurling themselves out of the burning building.
“I saw three people jump from their floor to escape the fire, but they were killed when they hit the ground,” said Kameran Ahmed, who owns an electrical supply shop next to the hotel.
Firefighters could be seen working throughout the night to put out the fire in what was once a gleaming, modern building with mirrored-glass windows. The next day smoke had darkened much of the building’s facade, and many of the windows were smashed and broken.
The police chief said the dead included people from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Canada, Ecuador, Venezuela and China, with some working for foreign oil companies.
The general director of the AsiaCell mobile phone company, Farouq Mulla Mustafa, added that four of its engineers from the Philippines, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Cambodia were among the dead.
The head of the health directorate in Sulaimaniyah, Rekwt Mohammed, confirmed the toll. He said one of the dead was a pregnant woman.
Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles (260 kilometers) northeast of Baghdad, is the commercial capital of Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region and the second largest city the Kurdish region.
The area is a thriving trade hub, with close links to Turkey and Iran. Kurdish officials have sought to cast their semiautonomous territory as a business-friendly haven in a country otherwise struggling with political and security woes.
Many Iraqis, desperate to get away from the heat and violence in the rest of the country, vacation in the Kurdish region in the summer.
A number of foreign oil companies operate in the Kurdish north, which sits atop about 40 percent of Iraq’s total 115 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves.
