3 dead, several hurt in Delhi’s Shalimar Bagh blaze days after Anaj Mandi incident

Three women were killed and several others injured in a fire that broke out in residential building in Shalimar Bagh on Saturday evening, the police said. It was the second fire in the day, after a plywood factory in Mundka went up in flames at 5am. However, nobody was hurt. The two blazes come less than a week after a fire in a building in north Delhi’s Anaj Mandi that claimed 43 lives and left another 20 injured.

The three dead in Saturday evening’s fire were all women, aged between 57 and 75, and included a domestic help.

“They were all rushed to a nearby hospital where the three women were dead on arrival. They did not suffer burn injuries, but died of asphyxiation,” said Gaurav Sharma, deputy commissioner of police. The fire took place in a four-storey building constructed over a 100 square-yard plot.

The injured included two children, two policemen, a firefighter and two others, who are out of danger, the police said.

The Shalimar Bagh fire was the second major blaze in Delhi on Saturday. It was preceded by a fire at 5am at a plywood factory in outer Delhi’s Mundka. The factory was gutted, and a bulb-manufacturing unit located opposite it was also engulfed. Twenty fire tenders were required to control that blaze, in which no one was reported to be injured. Firefighters said they took around three hours to douse the flames, but cooling operations continued well into the afternoon.

In the Shalimar Bagh fire, Sharma said the police were the first responders at the scene, reaching the spot within two minutes of the call made around 6pm.

Delhi chief fire officer Atul Garg said the department rushed eight tenders to the spot.

The initial probe, Garg said, revealed that the fire broke out in the kitchen on the ground floor of the house. “The flat on the ground floor was locked from outside. The fire began in the kitchen and spread to the upper floors, thus trapping the occupants,” he said.

Uday Veer, a firefighter, said that since the ground floor was locked from the outside and the fire had spread to all floors and the staircase, the rescuers had to gain access to the building by using the terrace of an adjacent building.

Firefighters tried to gain access to the building by breaking an iron grille and a window pane.

Simultaneously, the police broke open the door of the building’s terrace, said DCP Sharma.

“From the first floor, we rescued an elderly woman who was lying unconscious. The others were rescued from the second and third floors. Most of them were unconscious,” Garg said.

The dead were identified as Kantadevi (75), Kiran Sharma (65), and Somvati (42). The injured included 14-year-old Vanshika, Akshit, 16, Aeena, 28, and Lajwanti, 68.