India | Short circuit likely caused deadly hotel fire

A vehicle drives past Hotel Arpit Palace 

A fire at a budget hotel in India’s capital that killed 17 people was likely caused by a short circuit, police said yesterday.

No foul play is suspected in the early morning fire Tuesday that also injured four people, New Delhi Police Commissioner Amit Sharma said.

The Press Trust of India news agency reported that police arrested the general manager and a manager of the Arpit Palace Hotel on homicide charges.

Sharma declined to confirm the report.

Most of the deaths at the hotel in Karol Bagh, an area in central New Delhi full of shops and budget hotels that make it popular with tourists, were caused by suffocation, according to the Delhi government minister of health and urban development, Satyendar Kumar Jain.

A friend of a family of 13 who had traveled to Delhi from southern India to attend a wedding said three members of the family had died from burn injuries.

The hotel developer had a permit from the fire department to build up to four stories. But the building appeared to have six floors, including an unauthorized kitchen Jain said was built from sheets of fiberglass on top of the roof.

A video shot by a witness showed the roof consumed by flames.

Fire authorities said wood-paneled hallways and stairwells fed the fire and cut off escape routes. A video provided to The Associated Press by fire officials showed a firefighter carrying a person over his shoulder through an unlit, charred stairwell.

Firefighters rescued about three dozen people by breaking windows to access those trapped inside.

The injured, including a woman from Myanmar who authorities say sustained spinal injuries after jumping from an upper floor to escape the flames, were taken to hospitals for treatment.

Their conditions were not immediately known.

Relatives of Lal Chand, a longtime kitchen supervisor at the Arpit Palace Hotel, were waiting outside a mortuary after looking for him at three hospitals.

“We have checked so many bodies, but could not find him. Till now we cannot trace him,” said Chand’s brother, Satish Kumar. Chonchui Ngashangva, AP