Five Bangladeshi nationals including a three-year-old boy and a Jharkhand resident were among nine people who died when a fire broke out around 2am on Wednesday at a hotel on the second floor of an old five-storey building on Kolkata’s 15H Mirza Ghalib Street, police and Bangladesh deputy high commission officials in Kolkata said.
A fire in a hotel at Tarapith , a temple town in West Bengal’s Birbhum district, killed nine people, including two children, on Monday. All the identified bodies were taken to the Kolkata police morgue for post-mortem examination. Shikha Inn Hotel is among the several small hotels operating out of the same five-storey building.
The building stands around 50 metres from the West Bengal Fire and Emergency Services department headquarters at 13D Mirza Ghalib Street and within a kilometer of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and the local New Market police station. This is the second such incident in West Bengal within 48 hours.
Praween Prakash, deputy commissioner of police (central division), said three of the bodies could not be identified.
Bangladeshi media reported that the only survivor in Dutta’s immediate family is his eight-year-old daughter, Pakhi, who did not come to India. The family checked into the hotel on Tuesday after returning from Bengaluru and was supposed to return to Bangladesh on Wednesday.
Dutta, Bangladesh deputy high commission officials said, went to Bengaluru for medical treatment.
In both incidents, the investigation revealed glaring gaps in safety measures, including a lack of fire extinguishers, emergency water lines and dedicated fire exits.
