Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 21/strong>
Agence France-Presse: The number of dead after a fire that engulfed a hotel at a ski resort in northwestern Turkey on Tuesday rose to 66, the interior minister said.
Witnesses said desperate guests had tried to escape using ropes, footage showed bedsheets hanging from the windows, and media reports suggest some had died after trying to jump to safety.
Several ministers have arrived at the scene at the Kartalkaya resort around 170 kilometres northwest of the capital Ankara, and officials said the fire had now been contained.
‘Our pain is great,’ interior minister Ali Yerlikaya told reporters at Kartalkaya. ‘66 citizens lost their lives and 51 others wounded.’
The blaze broke out at 3:27am (0027 GMT) in the 12-storey Grand Kartal hotel, which has wooden cladding, he said.
Some 238 guests were registered as staying at the hotel, the minister added, a peak time during a two-week school holiday. The fire is believed to have started in the restaurant and spread quickly, though it was not immediately clear what caused it. Part of the structure backs onto a cliff, making it harder for firefighters to tackle the blaze.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cut short an address to his ruling AKP party congress in Ankara, saying: ‘Our pain is great, our heartache is great.’
Authorities warned the building could collapse.
A survivor who managed to escape the flames told local media that no alarms rang at the hotel when the fire started, complaining about the lack of any safety measures including fire stairs or smoke detectors.
Tourism minister Nuri Ersoy said the hotel had two fire escapes.
Footage revealed hotel sheets hanging from the hotel’s windows indicating some tied them in order to escape the blaze.
