SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq, July 16, (AFP): Guests leapt desperately to their deaths from upper-floor windows as a fire tore through a hotel in northern Iraq killing 30 people, 14 of them foreigners, police and medics said on Friday.
Citizens of Australia, Britain, Canada and several Asian and South American countries were among those killed in Thursday night’s blaze in Sulaimaniyah, which raged for seven hours before being brought under control, officials said.
A preliminary report prepared by the city’s hospital said people from 12 nations had died and a medical official said the bodies of the foreigners were identified by colleagues from the respective companies they worked for.
Visiting telecommunications engineers from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Cambodia, were among the victims, according to hospital officials and the chairman of the telecoms company.
“The number killed is 30, among whom there are 14 foreigners,” said Rikot Hama Rasheed, the director of Sulaimaniyah hospital, following the fire, which rose rapidly from the second floor of the six-level Soma hotel.
“The regional government will contact the embassies of the foreigners who were killed,” said Rasheed, listing Iraq, Ecuador, Venezuela, Lebanon, South Africa and Bangladesh as among the victims’ nationalities.
He said 22 survivors were receiving treatment at the hospital.
Witnesses told AFP at least three of those who died did so after leaping from the hotel’s windows in a desperate bid to save themselves as flames and smoke engulfed their rooms.
Mirwan Saeed, 30, who was visiting friends in the hotel, broke both his legs after making his way to the roof and
jumping towards a nearby lower building to save his life.
“We were in the hotel when the smoke started coming in,” he told AFP from his hospital bed. “I had no choice but to jump.”
Colonel Araz Bakr, chief of Sulaimaniyah rescue services, confirmed the death toll and said 42 people were injured, including seven firefighters. He said most of those who died were suffocated by smoke.
A city council official said an electrical fault caused the blaze, which also damaged several adjacent buildings.
“Women and children are among the victims of the incident which happened in the Soma Hotel,” said the official, Razgar Ahmed.
Sulaimaniyah, 270 kms (170 miles) north of Baghdad is the capital of one of three northern provinces that make up Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.
It is popular with tourists and business has flourished in recent years as it is peaceful, unlike much of Iraq which remains wracked by violence seven years after a US-led invasion toppled now executed dictator Saddam Hussein.
The victims from the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Cambodia worked for telecoms operator Asiacell, one of three major mobile communications companies in Iraq.
“We lost four engineers from our company, one of them a lady from the Philippines, and three of them men from Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Iraq,” said Faruk Mula Mustafa, chairman of Asiacell.
Two other Iraqi employees were injured in the fire, he said.
A US embassy spokesman in Baghdad said two American citizens received medical treatment after the fire, but none were killed.
More than 100 Iraqis who claim they were tortured and abused by British forces after the invasion of Iraq won a key legal battle in London on Friday in their bid to force a public inquiry.
Lawyers for the Iraqis said they had “incontrovertible” evidence the detainees were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment by British soldiers that included hooding, electric shocks and sexual abuse.
Judges Christopher May and Debra Silber ruled the 102 Iraqis should be allowed to bring a High Court action to try to force an inquiry into their allegations against the Ministry of Defence.
“The claimant’s case is sufficiently persuasive for permission purposes,” the judges said at London’s High Court.
“It sufficiently makes the case that the alleged ill-treatment may be seen as systemic and raises questions of its authorisation, or failure to stop it.”
The former detainees claim they suffered ill-treatment while they were held for interrogation at one or more of 14 British military detention centres in southeast Iraq between April 2003 and December 2008.
British Defence Secretary Liam Fox had previously refused to order a full public inquiry into the allegations.
Michael Fordham, the lawyer for the Iraqis, told the court Fox “has a duty to conduct an independent and effective investigation capable of bringing the full facts to light so that lessons can be learned for the future.”
He said a public inquiry was needed to properly investigate claims that torture and abuse were sanctioned by superior officers and became “systematic” within British forces during the five or more years following the invasion.
But James Eadie, the lawyer representing the Defence Secretary, said the British government were already setting up a team of investigators, the Iraq Historic Allegations Team, to look into the claims.
Turkey plans to deploy specially-trained professional soldiers along its border with Iraq to fight Kurdish rebels and stop them from infiltrating Turkish soil, the prime minister said Friday.
“We want units composed entirely of professionals to man our borders and work in risky areas,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised speech to members of his Justice and Development Party.
“They will not be a special army, but border units,” he added.
Since 1984, the Turkish army has been battling rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) waging an armed campaign for self-rule in the country’s mainly Kurdish southeast.
The rebels have rear bases in neighbouring northern Iraq and regularly cross the 350 kilometre-long (270 mile-long) border between the two countries for attacks on Turkish targets.
Since 2007, Turkish fighter jets have bombed PKK targets in northern Iraq numerous times and soldiers have carried out a number of cross-border operations to hunt the rebels.
Members of these planned border units will be recruited for a period of at least five years, Erdogan said, without elaborating on how big the force would be or when it would be introduced.
The prime mininster also did not give details on the composition of the new units.
Despite some tentative steps towards building a professional army, the Turkish Armed Forces — the second largest standing army in Nato with approximately 515,000 men — is largely composed of conscripts.
Erdogan’s announcement coincides with a significant rise in PKK attacks after jailed rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan said in May that he was abandoning efforts for peace with Turkey and the rebels called off a unilateral truce last month.
Some 45,000 people have been killed in the conflict between Turkey and the KK, which is blacklisted as a terrorist group by Turkey and much of the international community.