International Desk: 45 Indian workers lost their lives in a Kuwait fire. Their bodies were brought home from Kuwait by a special plane of the Indian Air Force. The C-130J aircraft carrying the body took off from Kuwait early on Friday and landed at Ernakulam airport in Kerala at 11 a.m. The plane landed there first, as most of the dead were residents of Kerala.
Family members of the deceased have been waiting at the airport since morning. When the body returned by plane, a shadow of mourning descended on the airport.
Kuwaiti authorities reported that 50 people were killed in the fire. 45 of them are Indians. Two are from the Philippines. Two more bodies are yet to be identified.
23 of the dead Indian workers are residents of Kerala. But seven of them lived in Tamil Nadu. Three workers, each from Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, died. Two people died in the fire incident in Odisha. Apart from this, one worker each died in West Bengal, Bihar, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Punjab.
A fire broke out in a high-rise building in the Mangaf area, south of Kuwait’s capital city, early Wednesday morning. The BBC reported that 176 Indian workers originally lived there.
According to the Arab Times, the investigation conducted by the authorities showed that the fire started from an electrical short circuit in the security personnel’s room on the ground floor of the six-story residential building in Kuwait.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar expressed deep grief over the deaths of these workers. The state and central governments of India have announced compensation for the families of the deceased. Minister of State for External Affairs Kirtivardhan Singh went to Kuwait to quickly bring back the bodies of Indians on the orders of Narendra Modi. Later, Kirtivardhan Singh returned.
