The cause was a fire that broke out in a five-story building inhabited by criminals and homeless people in the center of Johannesburg, the economic capital of South Africa at least 74 victims, including 12 children, According to an official count, around 60 injuries were also reported. The causes of the fire that broke out on the night of Wednesday to Thursday had not yet been clarified late in the afternoon South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was there in the evening and canceled a planned address to the nation, lamented this “immense tragedy”.
It is actually one of the deadliest building fires in the world in the last twenty years, with a death toll exceeding the 72 killed at Grenfell Tower in London in June 2017. However, the fire is the worst ever recorded in South Africa. Witnesses reported people jumping out of windows because the doors were locked every evening to prevent intruders from entering, but last night dozens of victims were trapped. Even after several hours, sheets and blankets were hanging out of the windows and witnesses reported children being thrown out of windows in a desperate attempt to save them from the flames.
The building, declared unusable, had been occupied by criminals who illegally offered its rooms for rent, forcing dozens of people into each room. This and other buildings in South Africa are at risk of fire due to numerous illegal electricity connections required for tenants’ lighting and heating. According to a television report, around 200 people were occupied there. A community official has actually pointed to a candle as a possible cause of the fire, which broke out in a Johannesburg neighborhood that was a affluent business district during apartheid, but is now filled with abandoned buildings inhabited by people who lost apartheid left the slums.
A tenant living in the building illegally confirmed that the fire broke out during a power outage, one of many to hit South Africa due to the mismanagement of its state-owned electricity company. The burned building was inhabited by a large number of “foreigners,” residents said. As the continent’s most industrialized economy, South Africa attracts millions of migrants from other countries on the continent, many of them irregular. In June, flames once again engulfed a run-down building in Johannesburg, killing two children under the age of ten trapped in an apartment.
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