At least 74 people, including 12 children, died in Johannesburg, trapped in a dilapidated building in the center of the South African economic capital ravaged by a violent fire overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, according to a latest report from the authorities.
“Among the 74 bodies counted (…) we counted 12 children”, declared Thursday during a press conference Thembalethu Mpahlaza, head of the forensic service of the province of Gauteng, which brings together Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria .
Rescuers recovered the bodies of 24 women and 40 men. “Ten others remain undetermined because the degree of calcination does not identify the sex,” said Mpahlaza. A previous report had reported 73 dead and the remains of a child under two years old had already been found.
Around 60 injured people were taken to several hospitals in the region. The rescue and search operations were about to end in the evening.
President Cyril Ramaphosa lamented a “tremendous tragedy” with the disaster which ranks among the deadliest building fires in the world in the last 20 years and whose toll now exceeds that of Grenfell Tower (72 dead) in June 2017 in London.
Going there at the end of the day, the Head of State undertook, with a serious expression, to “address the question of housing”.
The cause of the accident in the four-storey building belonging to the municipality and illegally occupied has not yet been established. A city official, Mgcini Tshwaku, mentioned candle lighting or other back-up systems as possible causes.
Opulent business district at the time of apartheid, the now neglected city center of Johannesburg has many abandoned buildings, often fallen into the hands of slum landlords and disconnected from the electricity grid.
“We ran to try to find an emergency exit,” Kenny Bupe told AFP. The 28-year-old says he had to break through a locked gate to escape the flames. “Others had already jumped out of the windows because they knew the door was locked.”
Located in a neighborhood plagued by insecurity in a country with one of the highest crime rates on the planet, the building was equipped with several security gates.
On each floor, barred doors double-locked every night to prevent intruders from entering have prevented panicked residents from fleeing, according to testimonies.
When the fire broke out in the middle of the night, panic swept through the corridors and in the early morning bodies were found piled up behind a locked gate.
Witnesses told reporters they saw babies thrown out of windows in an attempt to save them from the flames: “There were people grabbing the babies and there were also mattresses prepared for them,” said Mac Katlego, 25 years, a neighbor.
On the facade of the building blackened by smoke, sheets and blankets remained hanging on the windows on Thursday. The occupants of the building used what they had on hand to try to escape.
“There were bodies all over the floor” after the fire, described Noma Mahlalela, 41, a housekeeper. In the morning, the rescuers extracted charred bodies from the building and placed them on the road, before covering them with a sheet or a blanket.
Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN is “deeply saddened” by this fire and proposed that his teams “work with the authorities to prevent other incidents of this nature”, reported his spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric.
The President of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, deplored on X (ex-Twitter) a “devastating fire”. WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of a “tragedy”.
According to several testimonies, many “foreigners” occupied the building.
The continent’s most industrialized economy, South Africa attracts millions of migrants, many of them undocumented, from other African countries.
In 2019, police raided the building and arrested 140 foreign nationals, according to the city.
01/09/2023 02:33:55 – Johannesburg (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
