Fire kills two Iraqi children trapped in hotel room

AMMAN — Authorities on Tuesday said that an “electrical fault” was the cause of a fire that engulfed a room in a downtown Amman hotel a day earlier, killing two Iraqi children, official sources said.

The two girls, aged five and six, were trapped in the second floor of a 100 sqm four-storey building, when a fire broke out in their hotel room, a Civil Defence Department (CDD) official said.

“The children’s parents had left their daughters in the room and locked the door,” the CDD official told The Jordan Times.

CDD rescue teams, who entered the room from a window, located the children and took them out of the room through a back door, the CDD official added.

Police Spokesperson Lt. Col. Amer Sartawi said that an “electric failure occurred in their room, causing a fire”.

“The initial findings point to electric failure, but investigators are waiting for the final technical report which a committee of experts is working on,” Sartawi told The Jordan Times.

However, the second source told The Jordan Times that the children died of smoke inhalation.

A medical source confirmed that a government autopsy conducted at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine concluded that the two girls died of carbon monoxide inhalation.

“There were traces of burns on the girls, but the cause of their deaths was blood poisoning as a result of carbon monoxide inhalation,” the medical source told The Jordan Times.