Iraq hotel inferno kills 14 Filipinos

Fourteen Filipinos died when a fire broke out at a hotel in Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, on Friday night.

The 14 Filipinos, whose names were still unavailable as of press time, were believed to be employees of the 66-room Capitol Hotel, the Philippine Embassy in Baghdad said in an online statement.

“Our priority is to identify the victims, inform their next of kin and bring them home as soon as possible,” said Elmer Cato, the embassy’s charge d’affaires.

Cato, who flew to Irbil on Saturday with a team from the Baghdad embassy, said the Filipino victims were most likely female hotel workers.

“If I am not mistaken we lost more Filipinos in a single day with this incident compared to how many were lost since the Gulf War. We will find out why none of them were able to escape, how come they were overwhelmed by the smoke so quickly,” he said in a phone interview.

Trapped in massage center

Nawzad Hadi, the governor of Irbil, said the fire broke out in the hotel’s sauna about 4 p.m. on Friday. He said that 15 of the victims were identified as from the Philippines, three were Iraqis and one was Palestinian.

But Saman Barzanji, director general of the Irbil health department, placed the nationalities of the dead as 14 from the Philippines, 3 Iraqis, a Palestinian and another person of unknown nationality.

Dozens more were injured and taken to hospital in Irbil, said Fakher Harki, the department’s spokesperson.

The victims died after becoming trapped in a room in the massage center, which firefighters on the scene said had taken them around an hour to enter because of the strength of the blaze. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t allowed to speak to the press.

The cause of the fire is still unknown. There were no early indications that the incident was a terrorist attack.

Hadi said preliminary information indicated that the cause of the fire was an electrical problem in a sauna.

The hotel’s website says it has a 740-square-meter spa that includes saunas and a pool. Rooms at the four-star Capitol Hotel cost from $100 to $240 per night.

‘Terrible way to die’

Photos and video posted on social media showed dark gray smoke pouring from windows on the top floor of the building.

“We are very sad about this. It’s a terrible way to die,” Communications Undersecretary Manuel Quezon III said on state-run Radyo ng Bayan.

Quezon said the government would “do everything that is possible to bring our countrymen home and, of course, to look at every possibility to assist their families at this time of sadness and need.”

Cato, with vice consul Andrei Bauzon and attaché Manolito Ruedas, flew to Kurdistan on Saturday to coordinate with authorities there and to discuss the results of the investigation into the fire. They flew in an aircraft that was provided by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq.

Cato extended his condolences to the families of the 14 Filipinos who died and assured them that the embassy would do everything it could to ensure that the bodies are brought home as soon as possible.

He said travel to Irbil, which is some 370 kilometers from Baghdad, takes five hours, with Islamic State terrorists along the way.

Level 1 security

According to Cato, there was a deployment ban on new workers in Iraq because of the Level 4 security situation there. But Kurdistan has been assessed at Level 1, which allows Filipinos to go in and out of the region.

He said there were some 2,000 Filipinos in Iraq with some 1,500 more in Kurdistan, most of them in Irbil.

According to Cato, the Kurdistan region offers good working conditions and has relatively stable security.

The Kurdistan region in north Iraq has largely been spared the deadly violence that plagues other parts of the country. The region is frequently visited by tourists from other areas of Iraq and various countries in the region. With reports from AFP and AP