At least 61 people, including women and children, have died in a devastating fire that swept through a newly opened shopping mall in eastern Iraq.
Iraqi officials confirmed on Thursday that 61 fatalities were recorded, with the majority succumbing to suffocation. The blaze, which erupted late on Wednesday in the city of al-Kut, also left 14 bodies so badly charred they remain unidentified.
Despite the tragic loss of life, civil defence teams successfully rescued over 45 individuals trapped within the inferno. The five-storey complex, which housed a restaurant and supermarket alongside the mall, had only been open for a week.
The state-run Iraqi News Agency reported that people remained missing.
Photographs and videos on local media showed the Corniche Hypermarket Mall, a five-story shopping centre that had opened only a week earlier, fully engulfed in flames.
Provincial Gov. Mohammed al-Mayyeh in a statement declared three days of mourning. He said the cause of the fire is under investigation but that legal cases were filed against the building owner and mall owner. He did not specify what the charges were.
"We assure the families of the innocent victims that we will not be lenient with those who were directly or indirectly responsible for this incident," al-Mayyeh said.
The results of the preliminary investigation will be released within 48 hours, he said.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani said in a statement that he had directed the interior minister to go to the site of the fire to investigate and take measures to prevent a recurrence.
Poor building standards have often contributed to tragic fires in Iraq. In July 2021, a blaze at a hospital in the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah that killed between 60 to 92 people was determined to have been fuelled by highly flammable, low-cost type of "sandwich panel" cladding that is illegal in Iraq.
In 2023, more than 100 people died in a fire at a wedding hall in the predominantly Christian area of Hamdaniya in Nineveh province after the ceiling panels above a pyrotechnic machine burst into flames.
Additional reporting by Reuters.
