At least 49 people were killed and dozens of others injured in the Persian Gulf country of Kuwait, the state news agency said, when fire broke out on Wednesday in a building that housed scores of low-income workers, many of them Indian immigrants.
The fire began during the morning in a coastal area called Mangaf, about half an hour’s drive from the center of the capital, Kuwait City, the Kuwaiti state news agency reported.
The Kuwaiti authorities have held the building owner for questioning as they investigate the cause of the fire and try to determine whether “any shortcoming or neglect” played a role, the state news agency reported. The authorities also promised to launch a campaign to search for and combat building code violations, and said the cause of the fire was under investigation.
Speaking to journalists at the site, Sheikh Fahad Yusuf Al Sabah — Kuwait’s deputy prime minister and interior minister — blamed corporate greed for the tragedy and said that the owner of the company employing the workers would also be detained, the Reuters news agency and Kuwaiti newspapers reported.
The fire’s high death toll highlighted the perils faced by low-income immigrants to Gulf countries, who often toil under exploitative contracts and live in overcrowded housing, with regulatory protections that are limited or poorly enforced. Foreigners make up about two-thirds of Kuwait’s population. Many are low-paid workers from South Asian countries who perform a variety of essential jobs including construction, restaurant service and street cleaning.
Kuwait’s Public Authority for Manpower, which oversees labor regulations, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Many of the workers affected by the fire were immigrants from India, the country’s embassy in Kuwait said on social media. On Wednesday, India’s ambassador to Kuwait, Adarsh Swaika, visited several hospitals where dozens of injured workers were taken, the embassy said in its posts.
India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said he was “deeply shocked” by news of the fire.
“We are awaiting further information,” Mr. Jaishankar said on social media. “Our embassy will render the fullest assistance to all concerned in this regard.”
Kuwaiti newspapers published a video of a seven-story building with flames engulfing the ground floor and black smoke pouring out the windows.
In another video published by Kuwaiti newspapers, Sheikh Fahad was shown at the site of the fire, questioning an unidentified man about who lived in the building. The man told him that 196 people lived there.
Officials working in the municipality overseeing the area were suspended from work pending an investigation, Kuwait’s state news agency reported. Building codes in Gulf countries are often laxly implemented.
Interviewed by local television channels, an official in Kuwait’s firefighting force, Col. Sayed Hassan Al-Moussawi, said, “In a building like this, you’re supposed to go up to the roof, but unfortunately the door to the roof was locked.”
Instead, the workers were overwhelmed by smoke, he said.
The building bore a sign saying it was a workers’ camp for a company called NBTC Group, a contracting firm headquartered in Kuwait with business in construction, industry, logistics and related fields. Phone calls to the company on Wednesday went unanswered, and an employee at the company’s offices said that staff members had been detained by officials earlier that day.
Yasmena Almulla contributed reporting from Kuwait.
