Filipino engineer among casualties in Iraq hotel fire

BAGHDAD – A fire in a five-story hotel in northern Iraq killed 29 people, including a Filipino engineer and other foreigners, police and hospital officials in the city of Sulaimaniyah said yesterday. At least some of the victims appeared to have died as they jumped from the windows to escape the blaze.

Chief of police Brig. Gen. Najim-al-Din Qadir said the fire at the Suma Hotel began late Thursday night and was sparked by an electrical short. Four women and four children were among the dead, he added.

The fire reportedly raged for seven hours before finally being brought under control.

Farouq Mulla Mustafa, general director of the AsiaCell mobile phone company, said 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.

Qadir and hospital officials also said the dead included four Americans and people from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Canada, Ecuador, Venezuela and China, with some working for foreign oil companies.

Witnesses described a harrowing 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.

Col. Araz Bakr, chief of Sulaimaniyah rescue services, said 42 others were injured, including seven firemen. He said most of those who died were suffocated by smoke.

Sulaimaniyah, 260 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, is the commercial capital of Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region and the second largest city.

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.

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.                – (AP)