Iraq shopping mall fire kills more than 60

Express Tribune

18-07-2025

A fire tore through a newly opened shopping mall in the eastern Iraqi city of Kut overnight, killing at least 61 people, authorities said Thursday as grief-stricken families buried their loved ones.
Officials said many people suffocated in bathrooms, while one person told AFP his five relatives died in an elevator.
The blaze — the latest in a country where safety regulations are frequently neglected — broke out late on Wednesday and lasted into the early morning.
The cause was not immediately known, but one survivor told AFP an air conditioner had exploded on the second floor before rapidly engulfing the five-storey Corniche Hypermarket Mall in flames.
A civil defence spokesperson told state media that the fire erupted in the perfume and cosmetics section on the second floor.
Most victims were on the upper floors, while many on the ground floor managed to escape, he said.
Several people told AFP they lost family members — and in some cases whole families — who had gone to shop and dine at the mall days after it opened in Kut, around 160 kilometres (100 miles) southeast of Baghdad.
Yasser al-Mulla, who went to the holy of Najaf to bury his relatives, told AFP "in the midst of the horror and intensity, people began to flee upwards instead of down".
"It is a tragedy."
The interior ministry said in a statement that "the tragic fire claimed the lives of 61 innocent citizens, most of whom suffocated in bathrooms."
Most of the victims were later buried in the holy city of Najaf, around 150 kilometres (95 miles) southwest of Kut, an AFP correspondent said.
Local health official Jabar al-Yassiri said later in a press conference that the remains of 18 people were yet to be identified.
An AFP correspondent reported seeing charred bodies at the province's forensic department.
Ali Kadhim, 51, said he had been shuttling between the mall and the main hospital, where the victims were taken, looking for his cousin, his wife and their three children.
Back at the mall, he waited anxiously as rescuers searched for victims in the wreckage, with an ambulance on standby.
"We don't know what happened to them," he said.
Wasit provincial governor Mohammed al-Miyahi told INA the victims included men, women and children.
Civil defence teams rescued more than 45 people who were trapped inside the building, which includes a restaurant and a supermarket, the interior ministry said.
The ward of the main hospital was overwhelmed, while an AFP correspondent witnessed distraught relatives waiting at the forensic department for news, some collapsing in grief.